Owned a 5870 for 1 week and..

DIABLO · 13 Jun 2010 at 13:59

After 1 week of owning a Spaphire 5870 VaporX 1GB i am considering selling it, it's fast when it works but it's quite unstable in my setup.

In dual display mode with media center open on secondary display and a game (wow) on the primary the GPU and memory clock stay locked at the minimum speed, plus i will get occasional moments where the screen will flash to a solid colour sometimes grey sometimes blue sometimes other colours and the secondary display will turn of. I've tried all the option going to disable the gpu ans memory throttling (custom bios, locked 2d 3d profiles in afterburner, hacked CCC profile, AMD Gpu tool) but they all make the card unstable. Can anyone suggest a fix before i lose my temper with this thing and sell it for a no doubt loss (tried 10.5 and 10.6 drivers).

antran · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:04

I'm using the 10.4 driver, give that a try.

DIABLO · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:23

Gave them a go it's no better all it dows in fact is make the secondary screen flicker i guess because the memory is running at 300MHz.

AWPC · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:30

Welcome to the wonderful world of ATI drivers :rolleyes:

no-one disputes they make great hardware but as your finding out the drivers are just not good enough which is why Nvidia still have so many loyal fans

Muel · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:33

And also why some loyal ATI users are planning to switch to nVidia when the next series' arrive...

DIABLO · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:36

Seriously considering canceling my ebay auction on my GTX 280 which ran flawlessy in my setup.

antran · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:37

I never had any driver problems when my 5870 or my current crossfire setup.

DIABLO · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:38

antran said:
I never had any driver problems when my 5870 or my current crossfire setup.

Do you run dual display? In fact anyone else run dual display that can test that the same thing happens to them?

decrypt3r · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:43

diablo i have a 5870 + 2 monitors and the second monitor did a lot of annoying flickering etc to me also

it was when i overclocked it or changed the profile so it ran at 157/300 instead of 400/1200 default

the 10.5 drivers fixed all this for me

have you overclocked the card at all? give me a few screenshots of CCC overdrive and MSI etc plz

blaineoliver · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:46

10.2 driver?

Rroff · 13 Jun 2010 at 14:47

ATI have a long history of issues with multi display setups, there are work arounds to smooth out most of the issues now but it continues to rear its ugly head at frequent intervals, if you want to run a multi display setup with the least amount of issues and better support then nVidia is still where the money is.

DIABLO · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:03

The card has a stock overclock of 875/1250 if i overclock passed this or not the problem still presists with afterburner installed or not as well. Very wierdly if i use Media Center to play a standard AVI the problem is not there it only happens when i play a MKV or use the TV card.

toxicredcat · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:13

I used dual displays for a while and got the flickering problem when the primary card was OCed in any way. Ran the card at stock and it defaults to 400/1200 to stop the flickering. Never had a problem with it after that.

RavenXXX2 · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:16

Be pleased you're not running a fermi and dual display they idle at 70c, as said overclocking will cause the display flickering, lots of ATI owners run multiple displays with no problem.

liquidex · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:20

Try running at stock clocks of 850/1200. Main thing is to get it to default to 400/1200 as said above.

buttkinz · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:23

just use the 10.5 drivers, both nvidia and ati have the same issue with gddr5 speeds not working with multi displays when clocked down, nvidia has just kept the speeds full when multi displays are on, ati has it seems reluctantly decided to do he same as the workaround. if your getting grey and blue screens then just rma the card, iv run crossfire 5770's and this 5870 at different speeds with multiple displays and had 0 problems.

DIABLO said:
Do you run dual display? In fact anyone else run dual display that can test that the same thing happens to them?

either run the 10.5 drivers so you can use multi displays if clocked past reference speeds or run the card at stock 850/1200 speeds.

edit, damn you guys type fast!!

RavenXXX2 · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:23

Try down clocking your card to stock 5870 speeds so 850 core 1200 mem with afterburner.

antran · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:29

DIABLO said:
Do you run dual display? In fact anyone else run dual display that can test that the same thing happens to them?

yea, my second display is a plasma hehe

Rroff · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:31

RavenXXX2 said:
Be pleased you're not running a fermi and dual display they idle at 70c, as said overclocking will cause the display flickering, lots of ATI owners run multiple displays with no problem.

When I was testing a GTX470 setup I noticed this if I was overclocking with rivatuner but it didn't seem to happen if I used EVGA Precision - unfortunatly not got the kit here to test out the theory tho.

KatanaDV20 · 13 Jun 2010 at 15:39

As much as I like ATI cards their CCC and drivers can be fussy in my experience. Ive made it a point never ever to update the drivers. Each time Ive done that its misery of some sort. One time after an update I spent ages tracking down an old version of CCC and driver that worked (this was when I had my old 4870). Hint: Keep a copy of CCC that you know works well if you wanna update.

I just got a new 5850 and just chucked in the driver CD that came with it and it just works now, no problems. And its gonna stay that way!