Soldato
Skip to bottom if you hate reading 
As you all might know, a lot of people, including myself have experience some kind of problem with the 5850/5870 cards.
From getting no boot at all, to fans revving up, driver crash errors, and many more (even my windows experience score used to show at 2.0 to begin with!) - i would like to add to its glitching wonderfulness
Now before I go on, i do not intend to slate ATI, as a previous Nvidia fanboy, this time round i wanted to give the opposition a try, that being ATI. I have never had problems with my Nvidia cards, from 8800GT's to GTX260's the drivers and stability of the cards have always been excellent.
As a first time ATI owner, i ran into many problems myself immediately, mainly driver stopped responsing messages, blacked out screens and other silly things, that and the fact that no matter what drivers i downloaded from the AMD ATI site, none worked - it was odd I had to use the drivers from CD provided, which i normally never.
For the past 2 weeks or so, gaming has been solid, Fifa 10 a breeze, Crysis never broke a sweat... But today, out of complete randomness switched the PC on after closing it down like normal, to find the screen was huge, i figured it was the drivers. CCC had dissapeared, so i uninstalled all the ATI software, my usual gpu tools such as RivaTuner/Afterburner etc, rebooted in Safe Mode and ran Driver Sweeper to remove all the left over crap. Rebooted in normal mode, went to install the drivers off the CD and it errorerd. I repeated the same previous method, this time attempting to install them from the AMD ATI site, same problem again, drivers or CCC would not install. I thought it might be overclocked rig, went into BIOS, Load Optimized defaults, repeat the same as before, still error when installing CCC. This was all on Windows 7, formatted Windows 7 and reinstalled, drivers and CCC still would not want to install, even after the format. As i was running out of ideas i thought it could be because i flashed the BIOS to the MSI one to unlock the overclocking potential, i wasnt daft i backed up the original BIOS and soon had it switched to that, repeated the previous mentioned still no joy!
One last throw of the dice was still in my favour, and i never thought this would ever happen but Vista was my saviour. Formatted, Installed Vista, CCC and drivers installed no problem at all.
My conclusion to this ridiculously long thread is:
Get Windows 7 > Your 5850/5870 is likely to not work, or not too well
Get a 5850/5870 > Dont get it for Windows 7, seriously (well not until something improves)
Get a 5850/5870 > Join the ever increasing long list of people with problems
I must add, still have had no time to test its stability on Vista, but it looks like its not going on Windows 7 no more, by choice or otherwise!
I hate to say this, and im going to get called a Nvidia fanboy for it, but come 300GT release time, i will be selling this and moving back on the green the team.
Its been problem after problem with this card, and im certainly not alone.
As you all might know, a lot of people, including myself have experience some kind of problem with the 5850/5870 cards.
From getting no boot at all, to fans revving up, driver crash errors, and many more (even my windows experience score used to show at 2.0 to begin with!) - i would like to add to its glitching wonderfulness
Now before I go on, i do not intend to slate ATI, as a previous Nvidia fanboy, this time round i wanted to give the opposition a try, that being ATI. I have never had problems with my Nvidia cards, from 8800GT's to GTX260's the drivers and stability of the cards have always been excellent.
As a first time ATI owner, i ran into many problems myself immediately, mainly driver stopped responsing messages, blacked out screens and other silly things, that and the fact that no matter what drivers i downloaded from the AMD ATI site, none worked - it was odd I had to use the drivers from CD provided, which i normally never.
For the past 2 weeks or so, gaming has been solid, Fifa 10 a breeze, Crysis never broke a sweat... But today, out of complete randomness switched the PC on after closing it down like normal, to find the screen was huge, i figured it was the drivers. CCC had dissapeared, so i uninstalled all the ATI software, my usual gpu tools such as RivaTuner/Afterburner etc, rebooted in Safe Mode and ran Driver Sweeper to remove all the left over crap. Rebooted in normal mode, went to install the drivers off the CD and it errorerd. I repeated the same previous method, this time attempting to install them from the AMD ATI site, same problem again, drivers or CCC would not install. I thought it might be overclocked rig, went into BIOS, Load Optimized defaults, repeat the same as before, still error when installing CCC. This was all on Windows 7, formatted Windows 7 and reinstalled, drivers and CCC still would not want to install, even after the format. As i was running out of ideas i thought it could be because i flashed the BIOS to the MSI one to unlock the overclocking potential, i wasnt daft i backed up the original BIOS and soon had it switched to that, repeated the previous mentioned still no joy!
One last throw of the dice was still in my favour, and i never thought this would ever happen but Vista was my saviour. Formatted, Installed Vista, CCC and drivers installed no problem at all.
My conclusion to this ridiculously long thread is:
Get Windows 7 > Your 5850/5870 is likely to not work, or not too well
Get a 5850/5870 > Dont get it for Windows 7, seriously (well not until something improves)
Get a 5850/5870 > Join the ever increasing long list of people with problems
I must add, still have had no time to test its stability on Vista, but it looks like its not going on Windows 7 no more, by choice or otherwise!
I hate to say this, and im going to get called a Nvidia fanboy for it, but come 300GT release time, i will be selling this and moving back on the green the team.
Its been problem after problem with this card, and im certainly not alone.
Last edited:
