ati 4850 revisted... powerplay or bios bugs

well, i have gotten myself few months back an ati 4850 HIS 512mbs. due to it not having efficient cooling i removed the stock and used a vf1000.

now i've been reading up on the powerplay and bios bugs which i seem to be getting randomly.

have tried all the fixes mentioned over the net;

• flashing bios to msi with correct idle
• setting fan settings in xml file
• enable overclock, overclock with 1hmz

but still, for example when i play dead space the game will run fine and then all of a sudden the screen will go black, or it will go black and then perfectly spaced verticle colored lines across the screen.

this also seem to happen with devil may cry 4, when it somehow goes out of the refreshrate ranges, which if i set vsync on it goes away well 95% of the time anyways.

last night after i just had the crash in dead space i touched the poor thing to feel how hot it was, and it was bloody hot though i guess 50-70 degrees is hot on touche.

it currently idles at 40 degrees and goes around 70 on load ( still have to double check this tonight again )

to say the least, i'm just so ****ing fed up with this ati card its not even funny any more, i wanted to bet on red, but it seems that green will always have less issues and just work out of the box compared to the ****ty HIS i have.

now my Q is, how many more of you guys who also have a 48x0 card has similair issues as to the powerplay and bios bugs ?

I got the stock Sapphire 4870 ... it idles at ~70C. Under load it climbs even higher. These cards were made to handle heat. I have no bios bugs etc etc. It has been a blast so far.

I was thinking about suggesting the MSI bios, but it seems you already tried that. Dunno what else to suggest. Reseat the vf1000 maybe? Did you cover all the memory etc with heat sinks?

ld13 said:

I got the stock Sapphire 4870 ... it idles at ~70C. Under load it climbs even higher. These cards were made to handle heat. I have no bios bugs etc etc. It has been a blast so far.

I was thinking about suggesting the MSI bios, but it seems you already tried that. Dunno what else to suggest. Reseat the vf1000 maybe? Did you cover all the memory etc with heat sinks?

Click to expand...

yes everything is covered as show in my bad photo of the mod. i even placed extra bit of plate on the black blocks on far right that used to be covered by original heat sink

! ATI Tray Tools !

I've set my 4870 to idle at 500/250, temp: 45-55 depending on season, on load I have the fan restricted to 40-42-44 depending on my 3 OC profiles (750/900, 750/1000, 800/1100) temp never goes much over 80 in summer and I can't hear the fan over the in-game sound.

Highly recommended.

i have the Sapphire 4850, it idles @ 44'C (gpu=500 mem=750) and under load its OC (gpu =685 mem=1111) running 61'C max

i did have some issues with farcry 2 on vista, but its better now that i have windows 7 and new ATi drivers

well flashing it with the saphire's one rules out crashing in deadspace, but it now has nice small greeny dots in devil may cry4.

guess i should retry the msi one or at least one thats similair, or mod the msi one so that it matches fan control of the saphire which works.

flashing with with the msi bios, but with saphire's values in it just resulted in BSOD's after driver installation.

then tried few other ones, even the "toxic" bios which was supposed to had few accumulated fixes in, but that also resulted in BSOD's after driver installation.

in the end, poor windows couldn't detect my gpu anymore, so i went back to stock bios (his 4850) then it picked up again.

from there few trail and errors, i ended up by going back to msi bios which after i shutdown, cleaned the fan, rewired my vf1000 connect directly from the psu (the odin i have has system fan only connector, used that). after just updating the vga with driver and no CCCMOM thing it seems ok, well for now anyways.

hope it holds out




related used link that points to other places...

Just got a Force3d ATI 4830 and it did exactly what you described... tried the bios thing, tried the tray tools thing and nothing worked... took it back to the dealer... swapped it around for another and now no problems.

Might be a faulty card.

This one has no issue.

Rendier said:

Just got a Force3d ATI 4830 and it did exactly what you described... tried the bios thing, tried the tray tools thing and nothing worked... took it back to the dealer... swapped it around for another and now no problems.

Might be a faulty card.

This one has no issue.

Click to expand...

well mine was definitely bios or some other bug, but its going solid (50 mins of dead space without any issues) now after my last attempt to get it strait. i hope it holds

rofl, so it lasted a month and is back (few steps in dead space and yay verticle lines). funny thing is, after that i reseasted the card and it ran without a fan last, was around 99 dregrees solid for about 5-10 mins without any chrasing or weirdness with the only thing happing was the deskop screen so no gpu load (if it weren't fubar before that its chances definitly increased now ). this only seem to happen when the card goes under "proper" load like deadspace or dmc4.

but i know when i get my 260 gtx this will be thing of the past as my other box with about this same hardware except the 8800gt running in it has allot less usses.

suppose this is one of those in the batch, the black sheep that one where not suppose to get, but after this i will not swear again with red.