sapphire 5870 niggle

[legend_of_chaos]

I have just bought a new system with a sapphire 5870 which is brilliant but i have a little niggle which is annoying the life out of me, if i use ATI overdrive and ramp the settings up to 900/1300 it's fine playing dirt2 no problems what so ever, i have just downloaded TF2 and i have to leave it stock at 850/1200 otherwise TF2 freezes and the sound loops, i have to ctrl alt del to open task manager to end hl2 process, is this a bug with tf2, im using catalyst version 10.4 if thats any help, i have a i7 930@4GHz, 6 gig of patriot ram, if anyone has any idea why i can ramp it up on dirt2 but not on TF2 i would be so gratefull for a solution.

 

[decrypt3r]

every game is different

you should download the 10.5 first and see if that helps before going further

 

[legend_of_chaos]

every game is different

you should download the 10.5 first and see if that helps before going further

I thought the 10.4's were known to be better than the 10.5's

 

[DIABLO]

As said some games stress the card in different way. I've found Heaven Benchmark a good test of stability. Mine won't do 900/1300.

 

[decrypt3r]

not sure, 10.5 fixed some problems as was having previously with 10.4

 

[buttkinz]

mine wont do 1300 on the memory under water so that could be your issue, it runs in vantage but not heaven or kombuster

 

[toxicredcat]

Your memory clocks are too high. try 900/1200 then increase your vRAM clocks by 10Mhz until it becomes unstable then back it off to the previous stable value. My 5870's memory becomes unstable after 1245Mhz. I doubt its the GPU core as just about every 5870 can do 900Mhz on stock volts quite easily. Mine does 945Mhz @ stock volts for reference.

 

[oweneades]

Your memory clocks are too high. try 900/1200 then increase your vRAM clocks by 10Mhz until it becomes unstable then back it off to the previous stable value. My 5870's memory becomes unstable after 1245Mhz. I doubt its the GPU core as just about every 5870 can do 900Mhz on stock volts quite easily. Mine does 945Mhz @ stock volts for reference.

Technically yes although one thing to remember is that the HD5870's memory (controller) has a form of error detection meaning you won't initially see it become unstable. What you will see is a reduction in performance followed most likely by a complete lock up.

Do as toxicredcat suggests but instead of looking for instability watch out for the point that your scores decrease as the memory clock increases.

*In basic terms this essentially corrects errors on the fly at the cost of performance. Of course you will get to the point of diminishing returns whereby any increased memory clock will result in reduced performance due to errors.

A more technical explanation can be found here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2841/12

Like the changes to VRM monitoring, the significant ramifications of this will be felt with overclocking. Overclocking attempts that previously would push the bus too hard and lead to errors now will no longer do so, making higher overclocks possible. However this is a bit of an illusion as retransmissions reduce performance. The scenario laid out to us by AMD is that overclockers who have reached the limits of their card’s memory bus will now see the impact of this as a drop in performance due to retransmissions, rather than crashing or graphical corruption. This means assessing an overclock will require monitoring the performance of a card, along with continuing to look for traditional signs as those will still indicate problems in memory chips and the memory controller itself.

 

[thingemajib]

Technically yes although one thing to remember is that the HD5870's memory (controller) has a form of error detection meaning you won't initially see it become unstable. What you will see is a reduction in performance followed most likely by a complete lock up.

isnt that a feature of GDDR5 in general?

 

[trentlad]

You might want to try downloading your driver from your card manufacturer website (Sapphire in your case).

Last week I couldn't get around issues with the ATI 10.4 driver for the 48xx series from their website (ati.amd.com/support/driver.html). My games were stuttering and crashing for no reason.

My card manufacturer is VisionTek and the 10.4 driver I got from their site is working flawlessly.

 

[oweneades]

isnt that a feature of GDDR5 in general?

It's part of the GDDR5 specification (well at least part of the specifiction which tge Crypress memory controller is compliant with).

This still doesn't change what I posted above.