msi 5850 woes

[nathan81]

I hope Im posting this in the right section :s
Im not very tech minded,but will try my best to explain my problem and understand any advice given.

I recently upgraded from a sapphire 5770 to the msi 5850 twin frozr that was on special offer last week. At the same time,I upgraded to a 700w psu.

Since installing,I now get frequent framerate drops in BFBC2. It will be playing lovely one minute,averaging around 70fps,then it suddenly drops to 15-20 fps for around 20 seconds before jumping back to normal. I used msi afterburner to log the framerate and gpu usage etc.. It happens about every 3-5 minutes and actually has a pattern for it. (in the graphs,you know) The gpu usage drops in sync with the framerate.

Ive tried rolling back the drivers and have used all of them going back to 10.4,but no fix. Ive reinstalled the game,just to make sure it wasnt conflicting with the new hardware.
Ive also tried playing with the power settings for my cpu and pcie. Turned 'cool and quiet' off etc..
Ive even tried a fresh install of w7 home premium.

So,Im now at a loss of what to try next,apart from open one of these RMA things.

Im not 100% on my system specs to post up,but have just done this cpuz thingy if that helps..

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1688823

(Just noticed that my core speed of the gpu is 399mhz,is that normal?)

Any help or advice on this would be appreciated.

 

[Baneat]

"I used msi afterburner to log the framerate and gpu usage etc"

can you provide this log?

 

[[timko]]

(Just noticed that my core speed of the gpu is 399mhz,is that normal?).

If you're not playing a game (or anything else that requires 3D acceleration) then it downclocks to save energy and as a result reduces temps. When you fire up a game, the clocks will automatically switch back to full speed. Just look at the graph in Afterburner, start a game for a few seconds, quit and you'll see it went up and then down.

 

[nathan81]

Ive just run the game for around 20 minutes or so,and done a fresh log. It happens at least 5 times in this.

Sorry,had to use a stupid free fileshare thing as I dont have my own ftp

http://www.4shared.com/file/hqRNL5Hr/HardwareMonitoring.html

Edit:Ahh cheers [timko],I was a bit concerned that the gpu itself might be broken.

 

[nathan81]

I hope Im not counting my chickens,but I think I may have solved it.

Did a google search on fps drops and after trauling through 90% of the toot I found a post about cpu bottlenecking.
Ive clocked my cpu to 3.6ghz and just managed to play a full round of bc2 on high settings with a minimum fps of 54. No drops or anything untoward.

fingers crossed!

 

[[timko]]

Ive clocked my cpu to 3.6ghz and just managed to play a full round of bc2 on high settings with a minimum fps of 54. No drops or anything untoward.

Hopefully you also gave the CPU a slight increase in voltage otherwise you might eventually find the game crashing out or locking up completely due to insufficient volts for the overclock

 

[james.miller]

I hope Im not counting my chickens,but I think I may have solved it.

Did a google search on fps drops and after trauling through 90% of the toot I found a post about cpu bottlenecking.
Ive clocked my cpu to 3.6ghz and just managed to play a full round of bc2 on high settings with a minimum fps of 54. No drops or anything untoward.

fingers crossed!

this isn't something i considered actually. it is conceivable that if the gpu is chocked enough by the lack of cpu grunt then it could throttle down. at the end of the day though you're running a quad core phenom II - i would be surprised if that was the case. However, this is BC2 we're talking about and it has its fair share of oddities and weirdness. if this is all it takes to solve the problem then happy days


btw, the gpu downlocking is a feature of ATI powerplay and it can be disabled completely if need be. see here http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=328495

if you enable the unofficial overclocking method in msi afterburner and then increase the clockspeed of the gpu slightly, it should be enough to stop powerplay interfering with the clockspeeds. Hopefully then it won't be tripped up by the cpu.

Oh and welcome to the forums Nathan. Shouldnt you be at work

 

[Baneat]

I hope Im not counting my chickens,but I think I may have solved it.

Did a google search on fps drops and after trauling through 90% of the toot I found a post about cpu bottlenecking.
Ive clocked my cpu to 3.6ghz and just managed to play a full round of bc2 on high settings with a minimum fps of 54. No drops or anything untoward.

fingers crossed!

That can't be it, my 5850 doesn't get bottlenecked by my AMD cpu, and it's a 1st gen phenom x4

 

[nathan81]

Hopefully you also gave the CPU a slight increase in voltage otherwise you might eventually find the game crashing out or locking up completely due to insufficient volts for the overclock

I did indeed,got someone coming to check ive done it right though,just incase I kill it lol.

this isn't something i considered actually. it is conceivable that if the gpu is chocked enough by the lack of cpu grunt then it could throttle down. at the end of the day though you're running a quad core phenom II - i would be surprised if that was the case. However, this is BC2 we're talking about and it has its fair share of oddities and weirdness. if this is all it takes to solve the problem then happy days


btw, the gpu downlocking is a feature of ATI powerplay and it can be disabled completely if need be. see here http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=328495

if you enable the unofficial overclocking method in msi afterburner and then increase the clockspeed of the gpu slightly, it should be enough to stop powerplay interfering with the clockspeeds. Hopefully then it won't be tripped up by the cpu.

Oh and welcome to the forums Nathan. Shouldnt you be at work

James,you lost me mate :s You fancy popping over sometime and showing me what the hell your talking about?

Im off sick with my leg again btw

That can't be it, my 5850 doesn't get bottlenecked by my AMD cpu, and it's a 1st gen phenom x4

I dont know the hows or whys,but this seems to have cured it. Ive just been on a full (32 slot) server and played another two rounds with no problem at all. Before I would lose fps just sitting in a server on my own.

 

[nathan81]

Right,that didnt cure it. I cant explain why it didnt happen for a while,but after a few hours it came back. Must have just been a bit lucky that it didnt happen after I clocked the cpu a bit.
So this afternoon I thought Id have another go. Ive changed the 'UnofficialOverclockingmode' line in the msi afterburner config to 2 and when I rebooted my shader clock bar was set to 0. I cant remember what it was before,but it wasnt 0.
Ive since tried changing the config line back,but no luck. I know we cant manually change the shader clock with the ati cards,but if I cant,then why can something else change it?
Also,im now getting small white boxes flicking on my screen :s This is not going well....I should have bought a gtx460 instead lol.

 

[[timko]]

Ive changed the 'UnofficialOverclockingmode' line in the msi afterburner config to 2 and when I rebooted my shader clock bar was set to 0. I cant remember what it was before,but it wasnt 0.

AMD cards technically don't have a shader clock, the stream processors are AMD's equivalent and it handles shader and pixel pipeline duties. These stream processors run at the same speed as the core clock and the only way to change the speed is to also change the speed of the core clock.

Since the stream processors always run at the same speed as the core clock, GPU info programs like Afterburner and GPUz always leave it empty or simply a 0. As such, your Afterburner would have shown a 0 before you started changing settings.

Have you tried running your entire system (CPU, RAM, GPU) on stock settings with no overclock? If you still get gfx related issues with everything at stock then it's possible the gfx card is faulty.

 

[nathan81]

Ok,so ive set everything back to standard.
This is a screenie of msi ab.

This is what Im getting ingame.

Anyone seen this before?

 

[Marekj]

I had a very similar problem to you with the exact same card. I would get dips in frame rates for no apparent reason in games; usually from 50-60 to 10-20 in exactly the same scene. The problem would last for about 20-30 seconds, then return to normal.

Afterburner log would should GPU usage falling to around 20-30% for no apparent reason. Tried forcing 3d clocks through CCC and Afterburner, to no avail.

I gave up in the end and stuck my old 9800GTx+ back in the system. Worked perfectly.

CPU: 955x4
MB: Asus Nvidia 630a
PSU; Corsair CX 430

 

[nathan81]

Well tonight I stuck my mates old 5770 in and it runs prerfect. No fps drops,no funny business on screen.
He has taken the 58 to try in his rig. Atm he is running dual 6870's so if he has a problem with this card too,then it has to be down to gpu?

Im really at a loss here,£130+ and it doesnt work....

 

[[timko]]

He has taken the 58 to try in his rig. Atm he is running dual 6870's so if he has a problem with this card too,then it has to be down to gpu?

If he is getting big white squares when he games with your card in his rig then yes it will be the card that's borked.

 

[nathan81]

Ok,bit of an update.

Card is fine,no problems at all on his rig. Hitting good fps on high detail with no issues at all.
We thought it might be a dodgy psu,so i went and got myself a nice shiney new corsair gs800 this morning. It hasnt cured it,but I no longer get any squares if I play in low detail settings. Strange but I can live with this.

Im guessing its either my ram (ddr2 still) or my mb.
So ive decided Ill run bc2 on low for the moment,as its playable, (just doesnt look all that nice) while I wait for am3+ to be released. Then ill buy a new mb and ram and hopefully it should be sorted.


The fps drops are no more after playing with the ab config.

Cheers for the advice.