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My 5870 experience - Problems

Aurhinius

Aurhinius

Aurhinius

Associate
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
1,499
So I decided to upgrade my GTX280 for a 5870 seemed a reasonable performance increase and then the problems started.

Seems ATI do something strange with bios memory space reservation.

Install ATI card - BIOS starts, Adaptec raid controller loads okay. Onboard intel raid controller goes to load and I get the following error

no space to load PCI option rom.

PC fails to boot.

Hrrmmmm

Switch intel onboard raid controller to AHCI. Pc boots fine.

Go to try my favourite directx 9 game. 5870 frame rate is worse than GTX280. Switch game to directx 10. Things improve by almost 100%.

Hrrrmmmm


Needless to say the card is being returned.

I am sure there are many happy 5870 users out there. Is it a bad card? No.

Is it right for me, NO!

1. I shouldn't have to disable a raid controller to get my pc to boot because ATI is doing something obscure in the bios. Nvidia doesn't do this.

2. Directx 9 support should be strong games are still primarily directx 9.

Before anyone suggests it. Bios is the latest one for my board. This is not a board issue it is an ATI GPU issue. Works fine with an nvidia card :-)

So be warned, your experience may vary ;-)
 
Fair point about the one game though if that one game is the game I play the most then it has an effect on whether I would keep the card.

Bottom line is that on my board. Biostar Tpower X58 it is reserving some bios memory space that it shouldn't be that causes the board to not boot.

Yes I can run the intel controller in AHCI but I shouldn't have too.

Directx 9 is rubbish and yes they might be beta drivers but launching a product with substandard drivers is pretty silly.

I'm not an nvidia fanboy otherwise I would not have bought an ATI card but I have to say I have never had an issue with an nvidia card or found substandard performance in backward compatible titles.

I say backward compatible because I give ATI the credit that the 5870 is directx 10/11 hardware.

One thing I do think that ATI are doing with the 5870 that is great is the surround gaming support. I would love to have that and I am sure nvidia will pick up on it.

Sound through HDMI is nice too.

So big props for ATI in that respect.
 
It's definitely a bios issue but not one I can live with at the moment.

To be honest if I loved the card that much I would have stuck with it but it was more trouble than it was worth at this time.

The GT300 may well prove to be more trouble. We'll wait and see.

I may find I pick up the 5870 x2 at a time when the issues are resolved though X2's and *95's with dual gpu's tend to have their own issues in my experience.

I had a grace period with my purchase and I am exercising that right.

If you love your ATI card then fantastic. I am niether Nvidia or ATI. I take whatever is best for me at the time.
 
yes I cleared CMOS - that was my first thought.

I did remove nvidia drivers completely before the card ever got near my system.

Call it a motherboard issue if you like but it is now one people are aware of incase they think of purchasing the card.
 
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