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

[WalkinTarget]

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

Funny how you mention Sapphire, and my only previous experience with Team Red was with that Sapphire 6950 Toxic that was DOA. I like Sapphire cards overall, but still side with eVGA when it comes time to open up my wallet. It's a bad time to be buying an AMD card due to the miners snapping them up so fast, but I see an end to that madness in the next year, if not sooner.

[Duke{CLR}]

Nothing like a good cleaning an some new thermal compound, make me think that I should try a bit of this with my twin 470s.

[majinsnake]

Funny how you mention Sapphire, and my only previous experience with Team Red was with that Sapphire 6950 Toxic that was DOA. I like Sapphire cards overall, but still side with eVGA when it comes time to open up my wallet. It's a bad time to be buying an AMD card due to the miners snapping them up so fast, but I see an end to that madness in the next year, if not sooner.

I had a pair of Sapphire 6770s 128-bus width cards. They worked well, and even when I sold them to move to a single card (XFX 7870). Later, I thought my XFX card had died on me. It turns out my computer case was warped, and the card would not seat properly in the slot. Coolermaster CM-690 II case. It was not until after I bought an EVGA card - Geforce 760 GTX 4 GB card that I learned my case was warped.

XFX still allows me to return the XFX card, but now I know the card still works. I plan to put my third party fan on it (Acelero Twin Turbo), so I can sell it Ebay. I had trouble trying to put the original fan / heatsink back together.

[WalkinTarget]

Well, I knew it was not gonna be temps that caused this card to fail again, so I ran the Unigine 'Heaven' benchmark on it with hopes it was cured.

It was not. Another lockup and dropped video.

I looked the card over when I had the heatsink off and found what I think to be a heat damaged PCB right by the top left VRAM chip - very hard to see with phone pics, but its a discoloration of the PCB on the lower right of the chip in the center:


Oh well, it seems to be fine in 2D and in games that don't stress the GPU very hard. I'm not done yet - I'm going to try and disable the second GPU core (altho the damage looks to be to traces on GPU1) and rule that out.
If it doesn't work, I have another project card lined up after this one - an eVGA 460 2Win card is next on the repair bench.

[WalkinTarget]

It's way too quiet in this forum, so I came back to annoy anyone who will listen to my rantings. After my 4870x2 disappointment, I ended up picking up a HiS 6970 for a song and a dance, and it too had issues with overheating. I am currently working on fixing that - the TIM was absolutely shot, so I pretty much did the same routine as the 4870x2 - replace all TIM and GPU thermal paste with the GOOD STUFF - Fujipoly Ultra, which runs about $25 for a 5"x5" pad.

Check out how badly the TIM was on the 6970:

BadTIM.jpg

Having decided that buying problematic cards was probably no longer a good buying decision, I splurged on a working 7970 card last week. This one was a Powercolor model, garden variety, not a Gigahertz Edition, but it was only $155. Now with the newer AMD cards dropping fast in price, it may not sound like a good deal, but the buyer chipped in an Intel 80GB SSD for free as well, so I once again made an attempt to use an AMD card in my main rig. Got the card Monday - tested and benched it all evening, and it never broke a sweat pushing pixels to my 44" Eyefinity dual panel display.

Powercolor7970.jpg

This is an upgrade to my GTX580, and while it may not seem like a large jump, the 1.5GB of VRAM on that card is starting to be an issue. I am playing Company of Heroes 2 exclusively, and the 7970 handily beats the GTX580 and even the 680 enough to justify the $115 I paid for it (after subtracting $40 market value for the price of the Intel SSD). Oh, that SSD shows a 99% health rating and a lifetime of 9+ years via SSDLife Pro !! Not bad.

Anybody else rolling with an older gen AMD card ?? The Radeon 280 is pretty much a rebadged 7970, but I couldn't find any 280s near that price point I paid. They really do have issues with the TIM and thermal paste failing prematurely, at least in my small sampling of AMD cards that I have gotten ahold of.

[WalkinTarget]

Last update on this, as I was able to solve the card overheating issues. And I'll bet you $5 you never would have guessed what was causing it !! Wait for itttt .... waaait forrrr ittt ....



My second display !!


I have identical 22" LCD panels in an Eyefinity display, one hooked up directly to the video card via DVI, and the other running from the video card (using a DVI->VGA dongle) into a 4 port VGA KVM, and then into the monitor via DVI. It turns out that when you are running a second display and the properties of the display to not match, this will occur, as the card is not able to enter into it's 2D idle mode and instead runs flat out at its highest speeds. According to AMD, it's a feature not a bug.

When I am running Eyefinity, the card climbs to around 80c AT IDLE ... Using Win key+P I can disable the second display, and IMMEDIATELY the temps drop down to mid 40s. No ideal workaround yet, but I can either drop display #2 or purchase a DVI KVM (Good God they are pricey !!) and run the second display natively via DVI again.

So I now have a functional 6970 card (bought for only $50) and the 7970, which does NOT have the same problem that the 6970 has using the EXACT same driver and the EXACT same hardware - I just swapped cards to test things. The 7970 idles at around 38c hooked up to both monitors. I'm still in shock after retiring the GTX580 and going AMD on almost all of my rigs. After 15+ years of buying exclusively Nvidia, I think I could be considered an Nvidiot