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Possible 6870 Problem?

dava6711

dava6711

dava6711

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Joined
23 Sep 2012
Posts
21
Hi

I recently purchased an 'XFX 7870 GHz edition' graphics card that I'm having an awful amount of trouble with! But before I list the problems I'm facing with this card I'd like to know if it's possible to damage it by hooking up a PSU that's too powerful for it? I'm asking because the instructions supplied were a little vague and never stated whether I needed to connect the PSU's two 6 pin PCIe connectors or just the one, so I connected the both of them (attempting to run singular and not crossfire mode) but fear I might have been wrong? My PSU is an HP-580AP which is a supported PSU as stated on AMD's website!

Thank you for any advice offered
 
you havnt done anything wrong,if it has two connectors then both should be used,whats exactly wrong with it atm?
 
Wow, thanks for the rapid response. I'm using XP SP3 32bit edition with 4Gb of DDR3 ram and a P5E3 Deluxe and the framerate is terrible, my GTX260 which the 7870 has replaced easily outclasses it, Deus Ex Humam Revolution is so choppy its unplayable. I've installed several driver versions but the results are the same, also if the 7870 is inserted into the primary PCIe16x1 slot the PC won't display anything on the monitor but will if I connect it into the secondary slot? If I insert my GTX260 back into the primary slot it displays properly every single time?
 
try it in the primary slot and make sure you select pci-e#1 or peg#1 as first initial display or primary display in the bios

try with dvi or vga or hdmi if you have them,it should work
 
I only have DVI connections on my monitor but I'll attempt to connect it to to the television set then as it has HDMI connections. I'm currently using the 12-8 XP 32Bit drivers and when I look at graphics section of CPU-Z all the info is blank except for the card type which says 7800 series, I tried it yesterday using a different driver set and it displayed the clock speed as 300MHz?
 
I'm checking the manual to see where that would be in the BIOS, but if the BIOS was incorrectly setup surely my GTX 260 would fail to boot too?
 
i dont know but its worth checking just to be sure,you might need the latest motherboard bios aswell with the 7870 card

it will be in the bios somewhere to set the peg or pcie slot that the 7870 is clicked into,you want it in the same slot your 260 was in

did you fully uninstall all the old nvidia drivers before you tried the ati card? if not do that too
 
I'll happily flash the BIOS but didn't think I needed to as the monitor displays properly with the 7870 inserted into the secondary PCIe16 slot. I just hooked it up to the TV through the HDMI but the same result, it displays fine if inserted into the secondary PCIe16 slot (albeit with lacklustre performance) and fails to display at all if the card's inserted into the primary slot. Still boots into windows fine though but the monitor outputs a black display?
 
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if the second pci slot is 16x speed then it should be fine,i just thought the first top pci slot would be quicker but on checking its the same speed as second blue slot

an updated bios just might improve compatibility with the 7870

the juddering could come down to your 4gb of ram and 32bit os,i dont know, having the latest motherboard bios wont be a bad thing though
 
That's what I mean, both PCIe16 slots are full speed as its a x38 motherboard, but I'll follow your advice and update to the latest BIOS and see if it helps at all. Do you think I'll see a speed improvement if I drop back down to 2Gb of ram as I'm running XP 32Bit?
 
no keep 4gb,32bit os can only use upto 3.5gb of ram so youll lose 1.5gb if you drop back to 2gb

if you have a spare hdd lying around you could download/install windows 8 preview the 64bit version and test some games with that just to confirm its os limitation ect
 
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Ok BIOS updated to the latest version but the issue remains the same! I don't know what else to do? I've reverted to using my trusty GTX 260 again which is working flawlessly and runs rings around the damned 7870, why I went from Nvidia to AMD I'll never know, but lesson learnt I suppose!

Thank you for your help Wazza
 
I can only guess that the more powerfull 7870 is bottlenecking your 3.5gb memory and operating system,it would run even faster on xp due to no dx10/dx11 support,my best advice would be to test with free windows8 if you can

Don't be put off by ATI,I have the 7850 and its a great card,there is poor support for xp though,that includes game support
 
That's the thing, on paper it completely decimates my current Nvidia GPU, I can understand the possibility of bottle-necking due to an older OS, but no details showing up in CPU-Z under the graphics tab apart from the card family name and it refusing point blank to work properly in the primary PCIe graphics slot are simply unforgivable in my opinion!
 
Do any guru's out there have any idea why CPU-Z doesn't state anything in the graphics tab apart from the GPU name, all the info under Clocks and Memory is completely blank?
 
dava6711 said:
Do any guru's out there have any idea why CPU-Z doesn't state anything in the graphics tab apart from the GPU name, all the info under Clocks and Memory is completely blank?
Click to expand...

Mine is same for my 7950 on Win 7.. dont bother with cpu-z for graphics and search for gpu-z for ur graphics info.

Edit.. u probly need a bios update on ur mobo for that card to fully work and tbh u need to upgrade ur OS.. XP is ooooold man :)
 
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MyBrains said:
Mine is same for my 7950 on Win 7.. dont bother with cpu-z for graphics and search for gpu-z for ur graphics info.

Edit.. u probly need a bios update on ur mobo for that card to fully work and tbh u need to upgrade ur OS.. XP is ooooold man :)
Click to expand...

I'm about to install Windows 7 64bit Professional Edition now, I flashed my motherboard BIOS to the latest version yesterday and I'll go ahead and check out GPU-Z after I've finished installing Windows 7.

Thanks
 
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