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XFX 4850 XXX Crash problems.

Associate
Joined
15 Apr 2007
Posts
35
I purchased this card from Overclockers on the 2nd April 2009, and it has performed fine on the games I was mainly playing at the time such as Battlefield 2. However recently on certain games Battlefield Bad Company 2 (now seems to crash on singlepayer about 30 seconds into the opening scene), Mafia 2 amongst others I began experiencing random "vertical line" and "black screen" crashes which required me to reboot my system. Having looked on the internet this seems to quite a common problem with these cards and other models in the range (there are threads on these forums discussing it) although I am unable to find a solution. These crashes have started to occur more frequently and in games such as Battlefield 2 which had previously worked fine.

Temperatures never seem to above the mid/high 60c range, and I have tested the card on applications such as AtiTool and Furmark and no problems occur. I have tried the card on both Windows XP 32 and Windows 7 64, have cleared and reinstalled/updated the drivers several times all to no avail. Ran Memtest with no errors also. Tried 2 different PSU's (Corsair 400W and a 600w) The same problem also occurs in another system in which I have tested the card. I have contacted XFX and they have advised me to Overclockers.

The card is still under the 2 year warranty and I would like to enquire about receiving a replacement. So should I just fill out an RMA, my main concern is that as I say the crashes can be intermittent on only on certain games, and that the testing that is carried out may not find the fault, and I'll be charged the £10.
 
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try running furmark in xtreme burning mode and use gpuz to watch your vrm temps if its temp related it will most likely crash whilst you are watching and you will have a rough idea of the temps at the time it happens.
 
try running furmark in xtreme burning mode and use gpuz to watch your vrm temps if its temp related it will most likely crash whilst you are watching and you will have a rough idea of the temps at the time it happens.

Tried that already and no crashes after half an hour, and temps were getting higher in that than they seemed to get in games. Core max temp was 70c and the vrm 75c.
As I say in Battlefield Bad Company 2 it crashes after like 30 secs so the temps don't even have time to build up.
 
I have issues like this with my 5770 on specific games which are not suppose to happen I also contacted XFX and was advised to come here. Ive sent it twice and they do the same tests for all cards crysis, vatage etc.. and they dont test for your specific problem and because the fault didnt appear in any of the things they tested with; it got classed as fine twice so I lost 20 pound :/ and its still faulty!?!?!

Ive just given up and im going to buy a gtx 460 next month.

So basically dont send it off for RMA unless you get artifacting in every single game.
 
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I have issues like this with my 5770 on specific games which are not suppose to happen I also contacted XFX and was advised to come here. Ive sent it twice and because they do the same tests on all cards they didnt test for my fault :o and classed it as fine twice!

Ive just given up and im going to buy a gtx 460 next month.

So basically dont send it off for RMA unless you get artifacting in every single game.

Yeah that's pretty much what I thought. Although at the end of the day the product is still under warranty and clearly doesn't function as intended, this problem I'm experiencing seems to be very common and therefore a known issue on cards such as the 4850 and early 5 series cards. It seems that on the 5 series cards it was often fixed with driver/bios updates, but this doesn't seem to be the case with the 4850, the cards simply seem to be faulty.
 
Mines a bit worst I get lock ups on my desktop at random intervals and of course they cant be bothered to test it for 24+ hours so they class it as fine... It ****es me off really because I should have got a replacement.

Its annoying when your fault is 'uncommon' and they dont test the games you have problems with and the daily usage part isnt even bothered with. They just test your card with a bunch of benchmark tools and if no issues occur they just class it as fine which is probably the most lazy way to test graphics cards :o
 
Mines a bit worst I get lock ups on my desktop at random intervals and of course they cant be bothered to test it for 24+ hours so they class it as fine... It ****es me off really because I should have got a replacement.

Its annoying when your fault is 'uncommon' and they dont test the games you have problems with and the daily usage part isnt even bothered with. They just test your card with a bunch of benchmark tools and if no issues occur they just class it as fine which is probably the most lazy way to test graphics cards :o

The thing is though as I say this problem seems to be a common one.
In terms of your card a lot of people seem to have cured their problems with some of the latest drivers and vga bios updates have you tried that?
 
Yep I have updated my bios to the latest and updated the drivers to the latest and the problem sill occurs :/

I guess if your cards issue is common than just state that in the RMA request and pressure them into testing the actual fault not there standard selection of benchmarks which wont find your issue.
 
Before you RMA the card try uninstalling the drivers, booting in safe mode and using driver cleaner to remove all traces of old drivers, rebooting and then installing the latest drivers. You may also want to run chkdsk to verify that its not disk errors causing the problem.

If furmark on burning mode doesn't cause the crash then I would be surprised if it is actually the card at fault.
 
I've tried everything on mine, apart from the vga bios update (due to warranty concerns, and there isn't an updated bios) and still no cure.
To be honest I don't waste £10 for overclockers to do some generic testing, I've had some further contact with XFX, and they've said the best they could do would to be offer me a discount on their upgrade scheme, again I presume this would only be if they deemed the card to be faulty.
 
Before you RMA the card try uninstalling the drivers, booting in safe mode and using driver cleaner to remove all traces of old drivers, rebooting and then installing the latest drivers. You may also want to run chkdsk to verify that its not disk errors causing the problem.

If furmark on burning mode doesn't cause the crash then I would be surprised if it is actually the card at fault.

Done the driver clean, tried the card on clean installs of both XP 32 bit and Windows 7 64. Chkdsk finds no faults, same with memtest. Tested the card different PSU's, different ram, HDDs. I'm 99% sure that it's the card, as the problem occurred in the same games on a friends system. This weekend I'm borrowing a 5770 of a friend, will see if I get any crashes then.

As I've said if you google stuff like "4850 vertical line/black screen crashes" you'll find plenty of thread that describe the same sort of thing, and they all seem to boil down to the card being at fault.
 
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Thats a shame :(

I think an RMA if successful will only give you a refurbed 4850 or 5670ish but its upto you if you want to take the risk of losing a tenner.

Beginning to think I might just hold out till Christmas time and see what's available then for around £100. If it weren't for these crashing problems, I'd have been fine with this 4850 for a while...
 
Just a quick update, borrowed a friends XFX 5770 today, and so far no crashes in the same games with same system other than the card, played the game on both the same graphic settings as before and on higher settings. So I think I can conclusively say that it is the card that has been causing the problems all along...
 
my card is duff aswell(xfx 4850 512), ive found a lot of threads on this topic, so far ive found a couple of temporary cures which kind of suck really but apparently theyl get you by.
Underclocking the card to 550/950 (tried this and got horrible artifacting when my computer rebooted, but i did get a good 45 minutes to an hour of crysis in)

And apparently lowering the number of cpu cores used in msconfig to 1. (havnt tried this yet)
 
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