WT's experiments with ATI's hardware - tempting the curse

[WalkinTarget]

I've been buying Nvidia since .. OMG, the original Nvidia Riva TNT back when everyone was rocking a 3Dfx !! My only attempt to venture over to camp Red was on my last build when I bought one of the highly sought after Sapphire Toxic 6950s that unlocked to a 6970. What did I get for that ? A DOA card that was back-ordered at Newegg by at least two weeks. I threw in the towel and bought a GTX580 and never looked back.

I still would like to give ATI/AMD a try, and always wanted to grab one for cheap and toss it in a rig. Unfortunately the Bit/Litecoin craze has seen these cards skyrocket in retail price, so I gave up and awaited the inevitable 'Coin crash that would free up thousands of these cards on the market. I have long lusted after the 48x0x2s, and saw them selling on Ebay for more than anyone should pay for one. They are notorious for overheating, and any buyer needs to be aware of this and deal with it.

So I was in a project mood, scouring the FS/FT forums and happened upon a Diamond 4870X2 selling for all of $40, advertised 'as-is' and appeared to work fine in Windows, but would glitch and overheat in games. I could tell it needed a good cleaning, so I took a chance on it. It showed up today and I gave it a good cleaning but didn't bother to deal with replacing the TIM yet, just blowing dust out of the fans.

Out went the BFG GTX280 OC card, a card that scored a solid 7.3 on Windows 7's WEI performance score.



In went the 4870X2:



The Hell is that all about ?? It scored LOWER than the 280 ??!! A quick Google search shows that Windows WEI score does NOT recognize a second GPU (just like it won't recognize a second RAID'ed HDD) and that 7.1 score is the same score a single 4870 scores. Test it with games and it comes alive and shows it was a worthwhile upgrade.

The temps at idle were at 89-90° ... oh well, no surprise, I knew that going in. These things are ovens !!



The later AMD Catalyst utilities allows you to manually adjust the fan speed, so I installed that and bumped the fans from their default of 40% to a higher 60%. Temps dropped like a rock, all the way down to 56°, but fan noise was noticeable now. I settled on 55% and it is a nice balance of low temps and bearable fan noise. With the side panel back on, its no louder than any higher end card I've owned.



I wanted to use this card on my Win 8.1 preview rig, but its poor Apevia 650w PSU (remember that thing, KP ??) broke down in tears when I showed it the video card. It didn't have an 8 pin PSU power cable to bring the beast to life.

[WalkinTarget]

Ughhhh, tried to run a benchmark in Company of Heroes and it gave up and restarted on me with artifacts galore. Going to turn down the clocks but it looks like the seller was right - great in Windows, fails in games. The diagnostics shall now commence ..

[Apache Warrior]

Every Radeon Graphics card I ever had ended up having problems. I have never had any problems with my Nvidia Cards.
Apache

[Duke{CLR}]

Haven't had ATI in a while, mostly because I like the support EVGA give us USA customers great service. From what Juneau has said though they have different rules for other parts of the globe.

[WalkinTarget]

Interesting testing so far ... it has crashed only once, and that was on a Steam game. When I tried an older game (Dungeon Siege 2) that I purchased retail, it ran fine. The fans throttle up when gaming, and it makes some noise, but I've determined that the current temps should be fine.
This card may just end up on my pegboard hutch as a display card. I consider it geek art, so $40 for a conversation piece is fine as well.

[juneau]

Every Radeon Graphics card I ever had ended up having problems. I have never had any problems with my Nvidia Cards.
Apache

Nothing but sheer bad luck.

Haven't had ATI in a while, mostly because I like the support EVGA give us USA customers great service. From what Juneau has said though they have different rules for other parts of the globe.

That be true. We pay more for the products yet get less in return when it comes to aftersales.

[Apache Warrior]

I know, but after buying three over the years I have gotten gun shy about sinking more money into a brand that hasn't held up for me.
Apache

[juneau]

I know, but after buying three over the years I have gotten gun shy about sinking more money into a brand that hasn't held up for me.
Apache

You didn't lose money on the cards did you? They get replaced/refunded? Or were they all out of warranty?

[WalkinTarget]

I know, but after buying three over the years I have gotten gun shy about sinking more money into a brand that hasn't held up for me.
Apache

I'm curious to hear what cards you tried and what failed. I actually have at least 3-4 old ATI cards still lying around - we are talking AGP here (9800 Pro, X800 GTO), and they still all work.

I also found an eVGA 460 2Win (two 460 cards on one board) for $80, but can't justify buying more higher end cards when I only play on my primary PC. Just to fix the failing fans on it would run me $60.

[WalkinTarget]

Soooo frustrating !!! I decided to run the Unigine Heaven benchmark on the card - a beastly benchmark that will make most cards sweat. I felt I had the heat dealt with, and even bumped the cards voltage with MSI Afterburner. If it was gonna work, it should work under those conditions.
It ran the benchmark for a good 12 minutes - I checked every 5 minutes and it displayed no glitches or other anomalies at all. After another 5 minutes I checked on it and the PC had lost display and needed power cycled. Experiment over.

I yanked the card and popped the GTX280 back in - 100% stability is back. Looks like the 4870x2 goes on the display shelf now.

[WalkinTarget]

Unbelievable what these cards pull as far as power delivery. I'm seeing recommendations for nothing less than a stout 600w unit for the card, and the PSU calculator shows my hardware config will draw 449w at the wall, 499 under load.

I picked up a steal of a deal on an XFX Core Edition 550w PSU for $25 after rebate, so I'm not done working on the card, but since I originally used an XFX 650w Black Edition PSU for my testing, I KNOW the PSU was not the issue with the card.

I am planning on pulling the heatsink and re-doing the thermal pads as well as the TIM, and if I get daring might try a voltmod on the card. Voltmod is a last ditch effort though, as the last thing you want to do with these cards is to add more heat to them. I can't even find an Accelero cooler for it now, but when you could find one expect to pay $100 for it.

[WalkinTarget]

Round 2 with the 4870x2 card. I don't give up easily !! All parts that I ordered showed up yesterday, so I replaced the fan, replaced all thermal tape on the VRAM and VRMs and re-did the thermal paste using good stuff on both GPU cores.

The original card in place just to test it and see if the sellers diagnosis was accurate:


Time to start removing all of that heatsink !


A naked 4870x2 !!! The card simply overwhelms the stock heatsink when it heats up:


Can't imagine this helped airflow at all:


Reassembled, and ready yet again to test the difference that fresh TIM and thermal paste can do, as well as a new fan:


So far, so good. The temps dropped dramatically, all the way from 89° at idle to 68° at idle. Now recall that I had temps even lower before this cleanup, down to 58-60, but that took a big bump in fan speed from 40 to 55. I'm at the default fan speed of 40, letting the thermal paste and TIM cure and bond for a day.

Only odd thing is I cannot manually adjust the fan speed with the 13.9 Catalyst CC. When I reboot the PC, I lose the option under 'Gaming-> AMD Overdrive'. Its .. gone !?! I have to reinstall the driver for the option to reappear. Even so, setting the fan slider to 50 does not show that it ramps up to 50. GPU-Z also reports it still running at 40. Maybe time to give ATI Tool a try and see if that will manually adjust the fan speed.

Note that I haven't tried to play any games yet. This is what caused the card to fail before so I am not by any stretch assuming this card is 'cured' of its curse. I will give it a try tomorrow and see what happens when it ramps up the heat to play a game.

[K PhaNTOM]

89 at idle? Turn on a game and you can cook on it.

[WalkinTarget]

OK, I figured out why I could not see the 'AMD Overdrive' option under the Catalyst Engine software .... good ol' Windows UAC !!!! Disabled that and I now have access to the manual fan speeds and memory and core clocks (not that I would touch them on this card - in fact I tried to DOWNclock it before I sunk $$ into the new parts for it). Its now running at a staggeringly low idle temp of 42° (yes, down from 89° !!!) and I only upped the fan speed from 40 to 45%. I at first doubted that temp, but both AMD Catalyst and GPU-Z report it at that temp.

At 89° as I received it, this card didn't have a lot of headroom until it hit its peak of 125° and the VRMs would quit working and reboot the card and/or PC. After a day of curing for the paste and TIM, I think I have it ready to fire up a game and see what it will do. Even at 45%, the fan is putting off some noise, but I have 7 fans in the case, including 2 80mm, so it has NEVER been a quiet rig.

LatestTemps.PNG

[majinsnake]

Sapphire does the best cards for AMD/ATI. I would recommend them.