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HIS Radeon 5870 performance problems

D13

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do plain and simple have a seperate rig to test the card on? aleast then we will know if the card is faulty
 

Ryx

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I've updated the Motherboard's bios to a realease from late September. This has seen a slight improvement in the reported figures but not performance. The clocks will drop to 600/900 every three or four seconds but immediately revert back to 850/1200. The GPU load is now at 0% but spikes to 21% every five seconds or so. Both of these are at idle. All the playback and performance issues remain. I've tried turning off aero, not installing the ATI audio drivers and video playback in VLC - while the problems differ slightly (more flickering in Media Play and more stuttering in Quicktime) it is far from satisfactory. I'm going to have a detailed look through the bios to see if there are new settings to adjust.
 

Ryx

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I've looked through my boxes of parts and the only motherboard I could use has another fault....so building a separate machine to test it is out of the question for the moment.
 

Ryx

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D13, I've just tried that again - essentially the only other thing currently connected to the board is the RAID card (hardware RAID5). This time it seemed to work, clock speeds dropped right down and CPU usage at 0% when idle. Unfortunately all of my HD media is on the RAID array, so having one without the other is not really an option!

Starting to look like the old BIOS wasn't helping but essentially there's some sort of conflict with the Highpoint card. Very frustrating.
 
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D13

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that is unfortunate, obscure hardware conflicts like this are hard to resolve.

You may have to bite the bullet and return the card, What card were you using previously?
 

Ryx

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Immediately before I was using an old Radeon X800 after my previous card died during the rebuild. Not really looking forward to going back to that! I suppose I could try a 295 but they're pricey and have no HDMI out.
 
Soldato
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Ryx, You have to fault find with simple minimal hardware and software, forget Win7 it's not even released yet ! Use a single drive and XP with all Your test media and drivers on a flash stick

Use 32bit XP and clean install and make a ghost then You can ghost back clean in a couple of mins, the minute You add any drivers and software You cannot get back to that clean install...if you follow

You really need to test that Card separately as Your not getting consistent results and You will never fix anything working with multiple unknowns !
 
Soldato
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Why do You have faulty and dead hardware around, are You heavy handed or something ? with the exception of harddrives pc hardware is bomb proof but mechanically fragile !

please don't take this the wrong way as I'm trying to help
 

Ryx

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I'm about 90% certain it's a conflict with the RAID card or a mobo issue when multiple PCI-E slots are in use - it's working perfectly now with the new BIOS installed and the RAID card unplugged.

As for the old hardware - I just never throw anything out, much to my girlfriend's irritation. One faulty motherboard, that went wrong out of warranty, hardly makes me heavy handed...I hope. This is the first real problem I've had in years of building PCs, I may try Asus tech support - ATI's has not been very helpful.
 
Soldato
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I'm about 90% certain it's a conflict with the RAID card or a mobo issue when multiple PCI-E slots are in use - it's working perfectly now with the new BIOS installed and the RAID card unplugged.

As for the old hardware - I just never throw anything out, much to my girlfriend's irritation. One faulty motherboard, that went wrong out of warranty, hardly makes me heavy handed...I hope. This is the first real problem I've had in years of building PCs, I may try Asus tech support - ATI's has not been very helpful.

Why don't You Use the on-board Intel Raid ?, It's pretty good and besides like Adaptec fully supported by MS (very surprised W7 supported Your highpoint and vista did not as they are basically the same)
Also always turn off in the bios everything You do not need/use.

You will never get any useful support for new products and even after the common problems/fixes do filter through, they will not cover odd ball setups.
Also nowadays If anyone did know something Useful they probably could not risk telling You for liability reasons if say You tripped over the Power cord or split Your figure nail working on it :D

Anyway, glad You have it working ;)
 

Ryx

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Well it's hardly ideal as I can't use the RAID card and the 5870 at the same time and as all my HD media is on the RAID array it renders it kind of pointless:(

The RAID card, though hardware, is very processor intensive so I'm thinking of switching to a more powerful card. Sadly RAID controllers are very expensive when they get good. I can't use the onboard RAID as it will only take 6 drives, which won't give me sufficient storage.
 
Soldato
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Well it's hardly ideal as I can't use the RAID card and the 5870 at the same time and as all my HD media is on the RAID array it renders it kind of pointless:(

The RAID card, though hardware, is very processor intensive so I'm thinking of switching to a more powerful card. Sadly RAID controllers are very expensive when they get good. I can't use the onboard RAID as it will only take 6 drives, which won't give me sufficient storage.

Well, I'm not even going to ask what You need that kind of storage for ;)
There is nothing You could do with HD capturing/rendering that requires Raid, as 2 separate fast SATA drives are faster than working within the aray !
For what a raid setup will cost You could buy 10 HD's and have half of them as backup stored off the pc. Raid is too much of a pain when You need to migrate the data .
For what You seem to want to do with this PC I am very surprised at the top end motherboard and GFX card You have chosen...but hey You may be right and the rest of Us with a Server, Gamer and media center PC's may have it wrong :D

But good luck to you anyway
 
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the mb has four pcie x16 slots so check the bios and setup that one of the slots gets atleast x16 speed and the other 8x speed
might be a good idea to update the bios on the raid card?
 
Caporegime
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Is it bad that I can't stop my brain from keeping going back to the fact the pci-e slots are Nvidia made :p

Shouldn't the raid card not be using cpu time constantly, while its not being accessed? I'm not sure why the raid card/drives are using so much cpu time, somethings being accessed and its likely, I would think the access is causing a lot of access overhead meaning lots of interupting other messages to the 5870 getting through.

I've actually gotten mostly bored of raid, though I only ever used raid 0 for speed, I still used single drives for backups but I got fed up of the number of drives in the computer, the noise, the power, heat, space/airflow issues.

I just got one of the slide in hard drive caddies, I keep a couple older 300-500gb's in a drawer and if I want to back up data, or access some media on them, i stick them in the caddie, and theres my backup/media when I want it, silent, powerless and not a pain in my behind the rest of the time.

The other option of course, is a newer bios for the raid card, anything available, or new drivers for the card?

Frankly its the raid card at fault judging by the constant cpu usage and access,(unless I'm forgetting something about raid 5, does it constantly monitor the drives?). I would say, if you can fix the raid card, stop the cpu usage, the other problems would also go away. Raid bios/drivers are the next step to get it all working together.
 

Ryx

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The mistake I made was buying a cheap RAID card and I've regretted it ever since - I went for a high end spec on everything else and then got a £200 RAID card, in hindsight foolish. The entry level Highpoints, while claiming to have hardware RAID, make the CPU do a lot of the work (I have since established this from reading around, most reviews were positive) while a more expensive card £600+ should do it all. Highpoint are also very bad at updating their drivers and card BIOS (nothing has happened since April 2008). The motherboard should have no problems coping with the 5870 and a RAID card, which was why I got it in the first place - it was meant to be one of the first consumber boards that could cope with mass storage and a high end graphics card. I guess my only option is a more expensive RAID card but there is no guarantee it will improve performance.
 
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chipset driver

just a quick idear have you tryed uninstalling the old chipset driver then your grafix cards drivers download the latest chipset driver then reinstall the grafix card..
 
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