Need to pick someone's brain.

[Kuga]

Howsit gents,

I need some assistance.

I have a client that has had his PC by me for a week now, and I'm stumped.

Basically what happened, he bought a new graphic card, and it kept going black when booting into Windows. His specs : Gigabyte P67A-UD3, i5-2400, 4gb RAM, and he bought a MSI 5830 Twin Frozr.

Long story short, my colleague and I changed boards, RAM, PSU, CPU.

Did a clean installation of Windows, was fine. Then discovered that running MSI Afterburner was the culprit. So uninstalled it off the clients hard drive, PC boots into Windows no hassles.

SO. Client wants to use MSI Afterburner for the fan settings.

My colleague then searched the web, and he found out that it had to do something with clock settings. I then ran GPU-Z, showed the default clock settings. Ati Control Center showed default clock settings. I then used AMD GPU Tool, which I use to OC my cards, and it showed that the clocks were running at 150mhz Core, 300mhz VRAM. I was like WTF!

So, changed it to default settings (800/1000). Loaded MSI Afterburner. And hoorah it worked! Rebooted a few times, and ran AMD GPU Tool to check clocks, and Windows keeps setting the cores to the low values and I have no idea why.

Ok so I thought this would be fine, phoned client, showed him how to change the settings, expecting the MSI Afterburner to not **** out. And it did..

Thought I figured the problem out, but it's doing the same thing with the default clock settings.

Under Safe Mode the clock settings are right, but in normal mode, keeps down clocking automatically and this is after a new installation of Windows with drivers.

So yeah. I need some help please!

 

[hannodewind]

I'm not so familiar with ATI cards, but I have this as a standard feature on my nVidia card. In order to save power and lower energy consumption (therefore lower temps), clock speeds are dynamically set to what is needed. The default settings are actually maximum clock speeds.

Try running a GPU intensive application (such as a game) and check the clock speeds. It should change to the default values. I know with my card the clocks drop to 300Mhz/100Mhz when just doing some stuff like browsing in Windows 7. A soon as I start a game or play HD movie, the clocks increase.

Hope this helps.

 

[killadoob]

Did you reload it fresh?
Did you remove the drivers with driver cleaner if you never reloaded?
Did you load the latest drivers?

Those numbers being so low is normal, run bitcoin for instance and it will jump to the correct clocks.

 

[Kuga]

I forgot to mention I used Furmark and the clocks stayed the same.

I reloaded fresh, I removed drivers with driver sweeper, and I installed 11.6 AMD drivers.

The client actually bought the card for bitcoin mining lol.

 

[CataclysmZA]

I forgot to mention I used Furmark and the clocks stayed the same.

I reloaded fresh, I removed drivers with driver sweeper, and I installed 11.6 AMD drivers.

The client actually bought the card for bitcoin mining lol.

You haven't mentioned what version of Windows you're running. If its XP, I would understand because its not exactly up to date with the abilities of cards to clock their speeds down to such low levels because that's something CCC would have to to itself.

I have experienced first-hand the strange things that can happen to Radeon clock speeds, my own HD5750 being the culprit that kept on overclocking the memory on stock settings. I had to manually underclock and undervolt it to make sure the damn thing kept working normally. Your problem is also not at all uncommon, as it still happens to some HD5xxx-series cards.

Linky for interest, similar card, same problem.

Also, it looks like Overdrive/Afterburner is the main culprit for many issues just like your one. See here. Send the card back, ask for a HD6xxx-series replacement. Otherwise, you can always bring it to me for a look-see.

Also, CCC downclocks the cards automatically when Windows is just sitting on the desktop and not using any 3D grunt.

 

[Kuga]

AH.

Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

I'll check those links out.
I think the culprit is CCC. It just sits there on the low clock settings when I run Furmark and bench the PC. So there's something screwed.

 

[nakedpeanut]

Sounds to me like the card needs a bit more voltage actually. But try removing all unnecessary applications.. No use having 3 things trying to manage the card and interfering with one another You never mentioned what size PSU he is running, although I assume a decent > 400w unit?