Tried everything that I and tech support can think of: Can anyone help?

Ovreel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 23, 2008
Messages
292
Hey everyone, I bought this Sapphire HD 5870 1GB video card around Christmas time, and so far I've had issues with it. I've had to RMA the card twice already, and this time they sent me the Vapor-X edition. My system specs are in my signature, here's a video of what's going on, since I'm not sure how to describe the problem exactly. I apologize for the low quality, but my phone was the only source I had of posting a video.

This problem only occurs when running two monitors in the extended desktop display mode. Any other setting works fine. Main monitor is a Dell 22" on a DVI cable and the secondary is a Vizio 24'' TV on an HDMI cable

Link

And a list of what I've tried to resolve the problem:

Different PCI-E cables
Checked seating of card
Checked connections of cables
Plugged monitors/PSU into separate sockets, not a power strip
Moved my RAM to different slots, tried one stick of RAM as well
Used my old video card (Visiontek 4870, works perfectly, no problems at all)
Tried tons of different driver sets
Updated the BIOS of the video card
Have the latest BIOS of my mobo
Tried a different HDMI cable
Even reformatted today as a last ditch effort with no luck

I've probably tried a few more that I can't remember, but nothing to this point has worked. The most frustrating part of it is that my old card works perfectly, and tech support insists that it is not the card causing the problem, so I'm thinking maybe there is a compatibility issue with another component? But I'm really unsure.

So, people of Hardforum, PLEASE HELP!
 
Mind explaining the issue? The video shows some stuff but its pretty low quality...not really sure whats going on.
 
At 3 seconds you can see a sort of flicker where it looks like part of the screen (near the bottom) is... jumping I guess. It happens again at 12 seconds when I re-open windows media player. Again, sorry about the quality. I'll see if I can find something to take a higher quality video with.

Edit: it happens kind of sporadically, but the one situation where I can replicate it 100% of the time is when opening a video with windows media player. Sometimes when playing full screen games I'll see a web browser page ghost through for a split second etc.
 
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Yes, can you describe the issue the best way you can, I see what happens in the video but I'm not sure what I'm looking for.
 
I always read about driver issues with HDMI on both Nidia or ATI cards, so first thing I would try is changing to a vga(most tvs have them) or dvi cable.
 
Well you said HDTV, and HDTVs have a 59Hz refresh rate, so to me the obvious answer is one output port is set to 60 Hz and the other is to 59.94Hz. Which means one screen should flicker every ~17 seconds.

You have to manually force both monitors to the same refresh rate. This might not be possible, but you are going to have to fiddle back and forth for a while.
 
The problem is with 2d clock modes and multimonitor configuration, the Vram jumps to the lowest 2d clock and a split second later jumps to multimonitor conf wich usually is max mem clock.
To fix this you have to flash the video card bios with one modified so that the memory clocks stay consistent in all modes 2d low-3d high-3d.

You could also try to use rivatuner to set a 2d/3d overclock profile with custom mem clocks.
 
Well you said HDTV, and HDTVs have a 59Hz refresh rate, so to me the obvious answer is one output port is set to 60 Hz and the other is to 59.94Hz. Which means one screen should flicker every ~17 seconds.

You have to manually force both monitors to the same refresh rate. This might not be possible, but you are going to have to fiddle back and forth for a while.

Both monitors are set to 60 Hz in CCC, It doesn't happen on a regular cycle though, either. Just when opening things for the most part.
 
The problem is with 2d clock modes and multimonitor configuration, the Vram jumps to the lowest 2d clock and a split second later jumps to multimonitor conf wich usually is max mem clock.
To fix this you have to flash the video card bios with one modified so that the memory clocks stay consistent in all modes 2d low-3d high-3d.

You could also try to use rivatuner to set a 2d/3d overclock profile with custom mem clocks.

Do you know of any sort of guide that could help me do that?
 
Just changed it, so far no issues, hopefully it stays that way! Thank you!

Only question now is how to have it automatically run the profile without opening CCC and manually applying it every time
 
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you can activate a profile I believe if you just right click the CCC Icon in the task bar.
 
Just changed it, so far no issues, hopefully it stays that way! Thank you!

Only question now is how to have it automatically run the profile without opening CCC and manually applying it every time

Thats great man. Always glad to help.
 
Looks like it's still doing it a bit, but much less and not as severe as before. Guess I'll play around with the clock speeds some more
 
i will buy your 5870 for 2 dollars. jk, i have a 5870 and there are alot of bugs with the drivers. best bet is to upgrade your card.
 
This was an upgrade. If I were to buy another card that would just be throwing away $200
 
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