AMD ATI Radeon Dongle and GSOD Issues Addressed @ [H]

NoOther said:
So posts about every news release for AMD including simple things like driver accreditation, repeating every post and news event for Eyefinity (which is simply a small step up from previous attempts to do multi-monitor gaming, which have been successful for a long time now) are not to be considered shilling for AMD? You also clearly admitted "fanboy"ism in your report as well. So tell me exactly how I am wrong in what I posted when you declared yourself a fanboy?

And btw, I have repeatedly specified which posts were shill posts and made a point of it. I have also made a point of posting when I thought something was deserved, like AMD helping encourage kids involvement in the Industry.

As for criticism for Nvidia, it is more your attitude lately in your reviews and posts. Look at how you have talked about AMD lately and how you refer to Nvidia lately. You give AMD excuse after excuse for things they keep messing up (driver releases that don't work properly, the GSOD that you glaze over and admitted yourself you put off), while you continually are more critical of Nvidia (Fermi being only one issue, but even their multi-monitor you downplayed). And what about posting on the Nvidia Optimus technology now in the new Asus laptop? Also what about Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine running on CUDA? How about an interesting report on Nvidia Tesla?

To be honest if I were to review what Nvidia is doing and what AMD is doing, this is what AMD has to report on with their GPU side (there may be some I am missing):

HD5xxx series with EyeFinity
OpenCL GPGPU

Okay, that is nice.

Nvidia has Tesla, Tegra, ION and CUDA. All of which have many applications in use and for future performance with a lot of legs behind them.

It used to be things here were very unbiased, but lately there has been obvious bias towards AMD/ATI. You have gone out of your way to promote them through contests, events, comments. Even when reviewing Nvidia products, you keep dropping how much you love AMD and their Eyefinity. Why does that belong in a review of Nvidia? If you are doing a technical comparison that is one thing, but to perpetually ram the same stuff down about Eyefinity in soo many posts is just honestly a bit over the top.

Plus to be honest, all I have been hearing lately from all the electrical engineers working in this area is about all the new technologies that Nvidia is bringing to the market beyond just their gaming graphics. Technologies that truly have a huge impact on what these engineers are doing. So this is where I am coming from, when I hear EEs who care nothing about gaming all hyped up over all the conferences they have been to lately where Nvidia is developing new products that are advancing their field, and then I come on here to hear yet another rant on Eyefinity, I am a bit perplexed. I hear how Nvidia has nothing coming out, oh, except for all the technologies they have developed in the last few years that are hitting markets everywhere. I have so far seen about 20 Tesla supercomputers coming into my company alone.

So you can see where I feel a true disconnect here going on. I am all for competition and love the new HD5xxx series by ATI, but come on, to say Nvidia has nothing to offer now? And to mention almost every Eyefinity update, driver release, and press release mentioned by AMD, yet leave out news releases and product news from Nvidia? I just feel if you are going to be reporting on [H]ard news, then there should be more about all the technologies out there from both companies and yet I see an overabundance just of the Eyefinity alone.

So if my comments are blanket accusations without merit, so be it. But every comment I have made has been dedicated to the topic you posted, I hardly call that blanket. I was hoping perhaps you would take a hint, but it seems you are more worried about your image and ego than you are about the technologies out there and possibly investigating what you are missing.
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500% agree. I will say that I liked when things were clearly more neutral here. I cringe to read some of the site heads' posts/reviews because I know it's going to be how NVIDIA sucks or Eyefinity rocks. I'd like to return to our "regularly scheduled programming" here.

I think a lot of people are being left out in the cold by this tendency, but aren't bothering to post about their concerns for fear of getting flamed or accused of being an NVIDIA fanboy.

Both companies make great products and do cool stuff.. let's hear about all of it! I was pretty boggled when I saw a post about AMDs developer-oriented OpenCL videos, but then nothing on Optimus. I'd think Optimus has a lot more to offer everyone.. gamers and regular computer users alike. More mobile game time..

Contrary to what you said Kyle, it's not the same as the previous hybrid approaches.. that's the whole point. It literally turns the GPU off when it's not needed. How is that not cool? lol.. don't you talk about power usage from time to time?

And posts about workstation application driver certification? How does that pertain to this gamer audience? I think it's pretty untruthful to say that you are sticking to your guns and only posting gamer-related stuff.. it seems pretty biased IMO.
 
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refraxion said:
I'll hold out for some cheap 30 dollar dongles :p
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30 dollars is an insane amount to charge for a piece of copper and plastic, these things could be sold for 10 dollars at 300% liquid profit.

Maybe 30 dollars for an active Dual link dongle would be more in line with reality.

either LCDs factories start bundling miniDP adapters with the monitors, including active dual link adapters for 30", or AMD start bundling dongles with the video cards, as the more or less paper launch of the eyefinity 6 edition of the 5870 has promised.


These adapters are suffering from the same inflation and greed that HDMI cables suffered until 2009.
 
BlueStorm said:
I think a lot of people are being left out in the cold by this tendency, but aren't bothering to post about their concerns for fear of getting flamed or accused of being an NVIDIA fanboy.
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sigh...I actually do get a kick out of this. I remember when the 8800 series came out and all the reviews and articles pointed to how good they were doing over ATi at the time. Every single ATi fanboy espoused the same BS you are. Nvidia pays your bills here, Nvidia this and Nvidia that, you aren't fair or balanced, blah blah blah.

Now ATi is putting out a decent product while Nvidia isn't doing anything in the consumer graphic industry currently and it is ATi is paying your bills, ati this and ati that, you aren't fair or balanced, blah blah blah.

Same shit over and over every year from a bunch of butt hurt fanboys that are always trying to find something to complain about.
 
Has anyone that had the dongle display problem successfully manage to fix the problem by attaching the usb port to a powered hub?

And I am happy there is a sticky on this issue, so please move the fanboi discussions somewhere else please.
 
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/02/25/ati-eyefinity-on-six-screens-first-look-review/

Well there's a simple benchmark. Let's see if [H] either glosses over or highlights the same issues that these folks have :)

I completely agree with Kyle that this site has a certain focus and other issues are not relevant to the vast majority of its members. However, it's very transparent that he has a subjective soft spot for AMD right now. Not a bad word said against Eyefinity and on the other side we have articles warning Nvidia not to fuck up their competitive solution? Yeah, real neutral :D
 
A major problem with their 'validated' list is that a majority of them you cannot find.
A huge amount are mini DP and not full DP which leaves a great deal of us out in the cold.

The handling of the adapter situation is very dissapointing to say the least. To relaease a technology such as this and not have accessibly priced requirements is a huge faux paux.

Wieson only lists mini DP's for sale at their e-tail link. Accell adapters can be found but there are reports that they do not work properly and the reviews are dated from February. The other 'validated' adapters either have no link and cannot be found online or reference Accells part list. This is terrible for the permeation of such an excellent technology.

It feels like Fermi may be out before we get an adapter solution that is viable. I personally don't think a $100, possibly problematic adapter qualifies as acceptable. Not to mention the difficulty in making sure your shipped adapter is the proper revision...
 
As a 4850 user, I have seen my share of GSODs.. but ONLY when using dual screen extended mode AND having Overdrive enabled in CCC. The card can still be set at default speed.

It happens on the system in my sig as well as when I was using the same card in my
Q6600 setup.

My main screen is a 22" widescreen ACER and my secondary is a Sceptre 19" 4:3.

The one screen runs at 61hz while the other runs at 60hz.

Both use DVI connections.

Different cables don't help.

Swapping the primary/secondary screens doesn't help.

Changing the PCI-E slot it is in doesn't help.

Running the screens at the same resolution doesn't help.

When I was running a 19" widescreen and the same 19" 4:3 screen, the same issue was there. Both ran at 60hz and the 19" wide had a DVI-VGA adapter.
 
Owning XFX 5870 XT.

Getting GSODs mostly on STALKER CoP after 5-10 minutes of play.

Fixed them by finding the optimal memory frequency of 1175. Now running my card at 865(stock)/1175(-125 from stock).

I don't know if I ever will RMA it.
 
I am not an nVidia fanboy whatsoever... I loved my 4870 bang for buck best video card out when I bought it, xfire was even sweeter.... except for the drivers!

...nothing but problems, bought a 280 sc... sold the 4870 for $70 american..


Kudos to AMD on this one.. but I have a feeling they did this because a group of users got together and it was made public. If you search the AMD forums you will find TONS of issues not resolved for the longest time... a year even..

just my 0.02...
 
DrLightman said:
Owning XFX 5870 XT.

Getting GSODs mostly on STALKER CoP after 5-10 minutes of play.

Fixed them by finding the optimal memory frequency of 1175. Now running my card at 865(stock)/1175(-125 from stock).

I don't know if I ever will RMA it.
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Very, very interesting. My 4890 came factory overclocked to 900 core/1000 memory. After reading your post I declocked it down to 4890 default speeds of 850 core/950 memory. Before reading your post and declocking it I had tried to play Mass Effect 2 and couldn't play more than 10 minutes without a hard lock. Since the declock I've just played 2 hours of Mass Effect 2 without one crash whatsoever.

The temperature of the card is the same, give or take a couple of degrees, so I'm wondering if there really is a memory frequency issue.
 
Well, I just tried doing the whole enable overdrive and then switch from single to dual screen extended mode... it worked for a minute or so, and then my main screen went solid blue, my secondary went black, and then they both blipped back on but everything was refreshing EXTREMELY slowly and I couldn't move the mouse.

I eventually did a hard reboot after getting tired of waiting for it.

Then, when it came back up, CCC would not open.

I opened up event viewer and saw some system error messages that had to do with "peer networking" not loading and an error number.

I looked it up on google and found that a single file had to be deleted so Windows could remake it in order to get rid of the error.

Rebooted after deleting that file and CCC started working again.

The file is:

"C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\PeerNetworking\idstore.sst"

Now why would CCC not open if that file and hence peer networking is not working? Seems to me like there may be an issue with the way they have CCC coded.

I have had this issue in the past where CCC would not open and I was not able to uninstall or install ATI drivers.. I am betting that that file being messed up was to blame.
 
NoOther said:
The "shilling" comment is directly related to events and posting of events directly related to promoting AMD products and Eyefinity. It is one thing to "talk" about the technology, a completely different thing to continuously promote said technology over and over and over ad nauseam. I am not saying that it didn't warrant talking about and that it doesn't bring improvement to the field, but that is almost all you talk about at times. I have been doing multi-monitor gaming for countless years without ever using Eyefinity. Previously if you wanted the best performance in that arena, you pretty much had to go Nvidia SLI. While it is great that you can use Eyefinity, I am still able to achieve most of the same things with SLI as well. So the "game changer" seems a bit much.
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Unlike the majority of nvidia's products ati brought many open source inovations.

For those of us who do have eyeinfinty set ups or had a chance to use one we know its a step ahead. having 3 wide screens with high res is a dream come true as we are able to see even more of the game world and be drawn into it more.

SLI doesn't do anything that Eyeinfinty can do. It just provides faster framerates than no sli. Now mabye when nvidia releases the drvers to allow thier version to workit might have some merit, but the simple fact is that you will need two nvidia cards that simply add to the cost. You can do eye infinty (though i doubt you'd want to ) with a $120 5750 card

Lets also not forget that ati has had the 5870 out since sept. THats eyeinfinty + dx 11 for $400 since sept. It crushes all nvidia's cards even the dual chip verison and has features no nvidia card currently has.




The myriad of problems with Eyefinity in a plethera of games, combined with the GSOD errors, power issues, etc. I see all the praise about how good Eyefinity is, and yet almost nothing addressing the fact that AMD is still slow at resolving their issues through driver updates, and still slow to respond to some issues. You even talked about in your post how people have been having these issues since the cards came out and you are just now addressing it with AMD? How long now has the HD5xxx series been out? I wouldn't say that is "due diligence". Maybe that term means something else in your field than it does in just about every other field out there.
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Did you complain when the gtx 8800 hit the market and dx 10 wasn't supported in all games ? Eyeinfinty is new and no all games suppot it. Big shocker. The point is , its out now and developers can take advantage of it and the list of supported games are only growing. At a much faster rate than nvidia's inovations like physx btw.

s for gsod isses , things take time, even nvidia has bugs and problems in thier drivers for months. Ati is clearly addressing the problem as latest drivers have fixed the issue for many .


You continue to harp on fermi being late and not having a new product to match against AMD's current product which is fair. However, it is not fair to keep promoting AMD and not talk about the issues related to its cards. Also I can point out that there are still no real DX11 games out for which the HD5 series was targeted and was a major point they tried to make when they didn't have a DX10 product to compete with Nvidia.
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Why is it not fair to promote the fastest cards with the greatest feature sets currently out ? What is he supposed to promote a geforce 285 which you can barely find on the market and when you do it costs almost as much as a the faster dx 11 eyeinfinty supporting 5870. And its not like the geforce product line perfect drivers. Remember vista and the months and months it took them to get a decent performance driver out after release of vista ? While all through beta ati had no problems


But your readers care about certifications for SolidWorks and AutoCAD? They care about lawsuits against Yelp, SATA 6GB/s, levnovo ThinkPads, Adobe Security Holes, etc. Which all have nothing really to do with gaming graphics or playing games. Also just a note on Optimus, it is in response to the fact that other technologies out (including Nvidia's previous technologies) require manual switching to utilize the features. Optimus helps determine that for you to automatically switch so you don't have to.
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Thats great , where is nvidia's cpu + gpu in a chip so I don't have to worry about crappy video performance ? Where is nvidia's dx 11 notebook gpu ?



I am not confusing HardOCP with PC Magazine, but perhaps I am confusing HardOCP with serious gaming news or news for the gaming world. Considering all the technologies I mentioned have impacted, are impacting, and will continue to impact the gaming world. But perhaps you just don't really understand the technologies and how they work or contribute to the gaming industry, in which case I guess I gave you waaay too much credit for maybe trying to be on the cutting edge of technology as it impacts enthusiasts.
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Ati is in every market that nvidia is in except perhaps ion which is targeting a very small segment and is a geforce 9400m


And? I am sorry I miss the point of posting that? One review for a game with physics and you think that balances it all out?
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how many games use physx ?



So every update on Eyefinity and running promotions and contests promoting AMD and Eyefinity is not considered "going out of your way"? Just curious, what exactly does "going out of your way" mean to you?
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I don't see the problem with this. Ati has the best product on the market and hardocp is promiting a unique thing on the hardware that they feel is great for gamers and apparently nvidia does also as they are now finally going to implment it in sli verisons of thier products.


Now lest I seem like I do not appreciate what you "do" do (because honestly, I wouldn't be here or post if I didn't actually like many parts of the site and honestly care about what goes on here), I do like the video card reviews. I think you guys do a better job with that than a lot of other sites. That is not something I have taken exception to. I am not taking exception with posting on the success of AMD or the how great their new set of cards is. I take exception with the constant barrage of "everything" AMD including things you, yourself seem to claim that your readers don't care about. That has been my point. Meanwhile on the other side, you don't post other news that is Nvidia related and does affect gaming, past, present and future. You talk about technologies like the iPad, you have mentioned Zune HD before, iPhone related material, all of which are in a market that Nvidia is selling technologies like Tegra and ION for. So you tell me it isn't relevant, and yet you post news on those areas on your site. So please tell me then what is relevant?
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News flash !!!! The Tegra is part of ZUNE HD . Also ION is just a 9400m on a netbook ! These products have been talked about here. These things aren't very interesting though because at the end of the day the zune hd is very niche and isn't selling well. The ion is once again a mobile 9400 geforce that has been talked to death here.


Correct me if I am wrong, but the GT200 cards arrived about a year and a half ago no? Those cards brought a number of upgrades and changes to the graphics processing at the time. They also included some more advances in the hardware to do more things with physics and CUDA, including the ability to do graphics and physics on the same card. I completely understand that Nvidia has not had an answer to the HD5 series of AMD, but AMD didn't really have an answer to the GT200 series right away, nor did they previously have an answer to the DX10 cards when they first came out. "That" being said, I agree that it seems pretty ridiculous that Nvidia is taking this long to come out with FERMI, but only time and the final arrival of the card can dictate the final results.
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I'm not sure what the gt200 cards brough to the market they were dx 10 cards. Ati had dx 10 cards already and then dx 10.1 cards. The gt200 were just faster dx 10 cards. Mean while nvidia has cuda locked down like an iron fist and will only last as long as it takes opencl to get off the ground or MS to create physics in the dx api.



I never said you were always biased. I am pretty sure almost all of my comments I have made in several different posts have been related to how things have been lately. And mostly to do with your over abundance of promotion towards everything AMD and Eyefinity. I have also mentioned in posts that the reason I came to this site in the first place was because of the fairness in the past. Why I am upset now is because lately there has been bias and even promotions of one brand over another. This is the reason I left other sites. Whether it be and over promotion of Nvidia, or and over promotion of AMD, I start seeing more and more bias towards a certain company creep into these sites and take hold. Will it always be that way, even after FERMI? I don't know, that is the reason for my posts, because I don't like the trend and think it hurts objectivity in testing and reporting.
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Why wouldn't they promote the best card on the market. What are they supposed to do have promotings on the gtx 280 ? Who wants that card at this point in time ? Its done , it wont play todays games with full feauers on like the new ati series will .




And how would that change anything or answer anything I have talked about. That would be shameless promotion for one company, the very thing I am railing against. The comment in regards to Tesla boxes is directly related to where gaming is going. Tesla boxes can be used either to construct better render farms, or a more powerful computer that can do centralized rasterizing. This can then be used by companies to have a centralized service that will allow you to connect and play games off of their system. There are a few companies pursuing this right now. I would say that is directly related to the gaming field. Also some of these systems are being used to run simulators that help train soldiers in the military. Because of the need to make these simulations as lifelike as possible, it takes a great deal of computation. Previously they had to skimp on graphics and physics which detract from the training effectiveness. With Tesla systems they can create even more lifelike situations that allow soldiers to train in more relastic scenarios. How does this affect gaming? Well some of the same engines and simulations that are used for the military are also sold to gaming companies to use for their games. Tesla computers could also be used to run better gaming servers that users connect to, which can then provide better effects and scenarios for those users as well. There are many applications current and future for these kind of technologies which is exactly why Nvidia is investing soo much in these new cards. I am simply baffled and amazed at how few people make the connections even after years of adopting similar technologies to gaming.
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I don' get your love for nvidia . Tesla sounds great. How is it diffrent than firegl from ati or past nvidia professional cards. All tesla is , is the latest geforce card getting ecc memory and having its price tag upped by $1000 or more and getting special drivers for pofessional apps. Ati and nvidia have been doing this for years.

So the limit of your reporting should be what people give you? How is that "reporting"? I guess again this comes from a disconnect of ideologies and terminology. I always grew up learning that reporting is about "research". Now it seems people just want to regurgitate what everyone else is saying and not doing any research themselves. How can you report on the enthusiast and gaming market, if you don't truly know and understand what technologies are out there that are affecting and helping promote gaming?
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I'd love an indepth article about nvidia's renaming bullshit personaly. I'd also love more eyeinfinty articles or an investigation into nvidia crippling physx on pc cpus.

QUOTE]


Here is the problem , your nvidia isn't doing anything at the moment and haven't since the new ati cards came out. Ati is exciting right now cause they unlike nvidia released dx 11 chips and there are dx 11 games out that people want to play. They also got more interesting because they have eyeinfinty.

These are popular features and the future of gaming. Meanwhile nvidia is still pushing dx 10.

Nvidia has done nothing but stiffle innovation. They take old cards and rebrand them to confuse shopers , they use the way its meant to be played program to handicap games so they wouldn't take advantage of dx 10.1 which brought image quality improvements and speed increases . They release physx and remove multicore support for the pc verison to make their gpus look better.

I'm not a fan of any company , but nvidia makes it easy not to buy from them. Now once again nvidia is holding back the industry because they have no dx 11 parts avalible and once again they rebranded old chips into a new 3x0 series line up.. It may be months more before nvidia even enters the mid range product line up with dx 11 and could be another half a year before we see low end dx 11 parts from nvidia.

Ati has dx 11 parts all the way down to $45 bucks. Its very hard to fault ati for anything. If nvidia had fermi out in sept and ati had no answer you'd see the fermi retailing for $650 or more. And don't give me the bs that they wouldn't .They did it before
 
Cobalt35 said:
Very, very interesting. My 4890 came factory overclocked to 900 core/1000 memory. After reading your post I declocked it down to 4890 default speeds of 850 core/950 memory. Before reading your post and declocking it I had tried to play Mass Effect 2 and couldn't play more than 10 minutes without a hard lock. Since the declock I've just played 2 hours of Mass Effect 2 without one crash whatsoever.

The temperature of the card is the same, give or take a couple of degrees, so I'm wondering if there really is a memory frequency issue.
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You were lucky you only need to downclock by 50.

First I had to downclock all way to left, to the lowest values of 600/900 from stock 865/1300. Than I raised gpu step by step, finally the memory, after that I found that above 1175 GSODs occurred, so I could even keep 900 for gpu but any value above 1175 for the memory would lead to instability, that is 125Mhz lower from the stock clock :(
 
DrLightman said:
You were lucky you only need to downclock by 50.

First I had to downclock all way to left, to the lowest values of 600/900 from stock 865/1300. Than I raised gpu step by step, finally the memory, after that I found that above 1175 GSODs occurred, so I could even keep 900 for gpu but any value above 1175 for the memory would lead to instability, that is 125Mhz lower from the stock clock :(
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Ouch, that hurts :(

I'm running at stock 4890 speeds without issue. It seems the factory overclock of +50MHz clock and +50MHz memory was a factor in the GSODs I was getting. (A GSOD is a GSOD as far as I'm concerned... even if they are caused by different things on different card series. The end result of grey or red stripes, a black screen, or a solid grey screen is a frozen computer and a hard reset, no matter what card it's on.)

5 hours+ of ME: 2 today and not one crash... not even a flicker. Frustration levels - dropping... anger levels - decreasing... plans to burn my 4890 with fire - on hold ;)

I was going to try earlier driver versions to see if the 10.2 drivers played a part in fixing it (I'm almost certain they have), but I dare not mess around with it in case it dies again and I can't get it back.
 
geok1ng said:
HardOCP is walking the fine line between being a tech site reviewing GPUs in a market moment that only one company has competitive products and a fanboy site.

The article is a shade fanboysher than i am comfortable with.

yes i do understand that Mr. Kyle loves Eyefinity, as the the now famous Boycott on Global Agenda when the game developers decided not to offer support for the feature can atest.

yes, i do understand that a tech site must talk about new hardware, and NVIDIA has nothing new to talk about. I don't remember HardOCP attacking NVIDIA unfairly.

but even so, when i read something like:

"Trust me when I say that people at AMD are genuinely concerned and wanting you to have a good experience with its hardware. The overwhelming majority of AMD Radeon 5800 series GPU users are having a trouble free gaming and desktop experience. I know that I have personally suggested that you purchase AMD 5800 and 5700 series video cards, and I still stand behind those recommendations. I am sorry that some of "our guys" are having problems and I do feel somewhat responsible as I suggested you purchase these products. We are working to help make sure your enthusiast computer hardware problems get addressed."

i sense that the fine line between reviewer and fanboy may have been crossed.

For further comparison let us remember the great articles on Anandtech over the SSDs, that more or less created the OCZ vertex and similars, the firsts MLCs that did not suck big. Even after many articles praising the Vertex, one can still trust AT opinions on the subject.

And just to add pepper: when will we see screenshots of image quality comparison of NVIDIA and AMD IGPs vs the new Intel IGP on the Core i3? i still dont believe that Intel could make an IGP that is able to compete with the former IGPs kings.

And Mr Kyle, could you kindly ask AMD when will we have centered timings on Radeon cards back?
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I think you have forgotten about the past.
Back when nvidia had the king of cards.....during the 8800 and even 2XX I recall capacitor problems, I recall SLi software problems when SLi was born; and [H] was there to keep on nvidia's ass until things got fixed. I recall shortages of 8800 GTs and [H] reaching out to XFX to pony up a supply of those for us (I bought one). I recall [H] bashing the shit out of then ATI for paper launches during the 1800 series and embarassing ATI for never releasing .....what was it , some 800 super duper pro something or other.

[H] has been up ATI's ass way more than nvidia, and don't even start on weak AMD processor releases.

It's just ATIs turn to have a superior product and they are putting up some great stuff for us.........I fail to see and fanboy in that.
 
geok1ng said:
yes i do understand that Mr. Kyle loves Eyefinity, as the the now famous Boycott on Global Agenda when the game developers decided not to offer support for the feature can atest.
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The boycott on Global Agenda is fully supported by widescreengamingforum as well. We've heard all the arguments before about unfair gameplay and such when it came to, as example, Battlefield 2. If you remember, BF2 didn't allow you to get a proper widescreen FOV, due to "unfair advantage" in widescreen vs. standard 4:3. While Dice have turn around in this matter and supports Eyefinity in BF3 and BC2, a company that ironically enough calling themselves Hi-Rez Studios, goes in the other direction and limits the FOV.

This has nothing to do with Nvidia and ATI. Eyefinity is only one way to get multi-monitor gaming. SoftTH (vendor neutral software based) and Matrox TH2G are other options. Soon Nvidia surround will be available also. Kyle is against game developers that artificially blocks technology that makes the games more immersive and fun.

And for what? "Competitive advantage"? As a game developer who creates an FPS game, they sure don't know much about what people do to get competitive advantage. Competitive FPS players lowers the resolution to gain an edge and turn off eyecandy. They want HIGH FPS for an edge and they buy equipment to get low lag and responsive input devices.

Blocking a technology like Eyefinity, which lowers your FPS with a higher resolution isn't the first step they should do if they want to block competitive advantages.

People who remember the narrow FOV in BF2 and the "artistic vision" in Bioshock, or perhaps have played a game where they need to go to widescreengamingforum in order to get their game working properly in widescreen, should join the boycott and NOT BUY Global Agenda. It doesn't matter if you have multi-monitors or not, companies like Hi-Rez Studios are the reason why your game is screwed up in widescreen.
 
By the way, a few years ago, I've had similar GSOD issues with my old Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro.

Every once in a while (rarely) my system would lock up, with vertical gray bars covering the screen. But that card was very old (over 3 years).
 
I had the blinking issue, bizlink adapter, asus 5870.

flashed the asus 5870 with the generic ati firmware on widescreenforums, and tada, no more blinking. apparently it adjust the power output on the dp signal.

had blinks every 10 minutes, now blink free for over a month.
 
It's March now. Where's the Dongles?

The dongle issue isn't "addressed" until retailers have them for sale at the quoted prices.
 
I deleted this statement because I did not want to see it quoted out of context.
 
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Still GSODs here - I have to stick with the September Catalyst drivers (which shipped with my card in October) because they're the only ones that don't frequently gray-screen my games. 10.2 offered no improvement, even with underclocking the GPU's core and/or RAM. I've been around the block with XFX support and I've tried everything I've seen suggested in user forums, to no avail. I'm getting to the limit of my patience, as it seems increasingly likely that a new 5870 (in response to an RMA) would be more reliable.

Basically just adding +1 to the "10.2 didn't fix the GSOD issue" bandwagon.
 
Just. Wow. The 'validated' list has been updated...:mad:

This just upsets me to no end that they would initially release something like this and not seriously make effort to inform people of the requirements of EyeFinity up front on release. We had to dig then to find out passive adapters wouldn't work. Then they post a list that has 'validated' passive adapters making at least some of us think that we might have a shot at not having to fork out another $100 dollars on possibly flakey adapters only to add verbiage that says basically the only reason passive adapters are listed becuase they will work to drive 2 monitors...we already fucking knew that. We don't want a bullshit list of passives that are validated to run 2 monitors we want a solution to our ailing ability to run this setup at a reasonable price since we already shelled out $400 damn dollars. :mad:

/nerdrage
 
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Just RMA'd my HD 5770 for a refund although I'm out the money for shipping, Newegg waived it's restock fee luckliy. Had a GSOD issue as well and it required a memory underclock for the card to be at all stable. Would grey-screen usually within 10 min. of gaming. Tried every fix possible, only thing that worked was to underclock the memory. I could have RMA'd it for another HD 5770 just in case it was a just a faulty card, but I did not want to take the chance. If I had the same problem with the new card, I would have to pay for shipping again back to Newegg, plus a possible $21.00 / 15% restock fee = now out $50. Don't know what card to get next, maybe a HD 4870 or GTX 260 ....
 
Kyle, if they're still keeping track, I've started seeing some flickering on the monitor using the Accell adapter. I got it from Amazon on 2/22/10. I've only had it happen once in-game (playing Grid), but it probably happens 2-3 times a day just sitting idle at the desktop. Specs:

XFX 5870
I7-920
Asus P6T
3x2 OCZ3G1600LV6GK
Creative X-Fi Platinum
X-25M SSD + 3 standard drives
Corsair HX1000 PSU

The only other things plugged into the USB are a bluetooth adapter and a wireless gamepad receiver. I've also got a card reader and front panel USB running directly off of the mainboard. I can't imagine it would be a power issue.
 
I'm new to [H] but I wanted to add my case for further evidence. I just built a new PC two weeks ago with the following specs:

Core i7 860
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P
4GB Corsair DDR3 1600
XFX Radeon 5850 Black Edition
WD 1TB 7200 SATA 3 HDD
Corsair 650W TX
Antec P183

I installed Windows 7 64-bit from scratch, and immediately installed the 10.2 Catalysts. I've never loaded any other version. At first everything was fine but then I started getting occasional flickering on the bottom half of my 24" Dell U2410 monitor, eventually followed by a GSOD on the 24" with vertical lines (black and green) on my secondary 19" Dell LCD. Occasionally, I could recover from this and keep playing. But usually not. My temps on the Radeon would get up into the upper 70's C but the fan would not fluctuate much. It idles around 52 or 53. I tried uninstalling the Cats and just going with the driver (no CCC) but the problems still happen sporadically. It's weird, sometimes I can play for hours with no problems, other times I get the flickering as soon as I load a game and shortly after that I'll get the GSOD. If it doesn't happen quickly, it doesn't happen at all. I also got a BSOD one time stating "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval." This was after the card had been acting up. Not sure if it's related or not.

The games I've had this happen in are: GTA IV, Crysis and Bioshock so it can't be game engine specific. I'm happy to provide any other info that would help but I'm seriously considering returning this card. If I could be assured this was a driver issue that would be fixed soon I would be willing to wait it out but if it's still not known then I need to get something I can count on. Let me just say that when it runs normally, it chews through the games. I was able to play Crysis last night at 1920x1200 with everything maxed out with no problems. Given that, I really hope this can be solved because the card obviously has the potential to rock.
 
ATI is taking the smart correct growth path for their cards , They gave what poeple they want most, more screen real estate. Now they can work on improving speed and quality of the cards.

Nnvidia pushing 3D junk is worthless outside a few games as an over all business strategy even if they make em faster with there next line of cards, it will fail due to they did not give the #1 demand item consumers want - bigger screenz for the cheap.

If nvidia fails to match eyefinity for screen size stuff on there next line of cards due out, they will surely fail and lose market share even worse then they are eating right now with no matching cards on the market.
 
First of all, thank you to HardOCP for addressing this issue - it is somewhat therapeutic to see that others are having the same issues. If it wasn't for Eyefinity, I would be all over a Nvidia card like a fat kid on a Smartie !

With that said, I am in the rather long process of building a new computer. My components are as follows:

i7-975 Extreme
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
6GB Muskin DDR3 1600MHz (6-7-6-18)
ASUS 5870 1GB 256bit DDR5
3ware 9650SE-4LPML
3ware Battery Backup Unit
X25-M 160GB SSD
Samsung F1 RAID Class 1TB x2
PC Power Silencer 1200W PSU
Pioneer Black 12X BluRay burner
Windows 7 Ultimate - Retail
3 x 30" Dell 3007WFP-HC
3 x 50' DVI cables
3 x Gefen DVI boosters
1 x Dell DisplayPort to Dual Link DVI Adapter


I've spent so much time going through different things to try and isolate this obscene 'flickering' problem. Changing monitors. Changing cables/boosters. Changing video cards (I have three identical ASUS 5870 cards, but that's another story). Changing drivers ...etc.

Long story short, I just finished taking one of these video cards and installed it into my old and trusty Athlon64 4000 with Windows XP Pro. Installed the newest 10.2 drivers, tested both DVI ports with my 24" Dell, and it works perfectly (with the exception of some minor internet browser artifacting, which I attributed to the system needing a reinstall ?). As soon as I used the displayport dongle with this old system, the 'flickering' problem showed up immediately.

Many of you are building new systems and are like me, overwhelmed with all sorts of new components that you may think are causing the problem. Save yourself some frustration and take your video card and dongle and put it into another computer - when you see the issue follow these two pieces of equipment, you can rest easy knowing that you don't have to RMA everything else you bought !

I hope this helps someone.
 
People who are having flickering and display driver crashes and are using the active dp to dvi adapter, try installing a 3.0 usb card in your comp. My daughters were having flickering and random driver crashes, did the bios update on the cards and rma'd their adapters to no avail. I ended up ordering a bytecc 3.0 adapter card last week to give it a shot. It ended up fixing my youngest daugthers problems so I ordered another one yesterday for my oldest daughters computer.
They are running biostar TA790GX 128m boards. Their problem seems to be not enough voltage going to the adapter. I am running a DFI Lanparty Jr 790GX board and have had zero issues since the beginning of January when I upgraded my videocard. For brands of cards, I have a powercolor and they have xfx but all are reference design so that shouldn't make any difference. All of them are HD5850.
The test that I did that ended up convincing me it was a power issue was with the dp display disabled they wouldn't have any lock ups. Enable the DP output and it would lock up randomly on both desktop and in games and would have random flickering. My oldest daughters 3.0 usb card tomorrow so will be able to confirm if her problem goes away too by Sat evening.
 
matrix563 - the cables are actually 100' each (I wrote 50' but was only able to get 100' through the retailer I'm dealing with - they're Gefen dual link, capable of supporting this setup). I need them this long because the computer is several rooms away from my office/monitors. I put it far away because I wanted my office to be absolutely silent, no fans, no drives noise, nothing ... you can hear a pin drop in there.

dcds1 - your suggestion is encouraging. It makes sense and I'm VERY anxious to try it. I hope you remember to update this thread with your findings ! Please confirm, is this what you had in mind ? http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815283031&cm_re=usb_3.0-_-15-283-031-_-Product ? If not, please direct me to the exact item. Thanks !
 
I was one of the ones that submitted my problems with my HD5970 GSOD to Kyle.

AMD has yet to contact me, but I might be ok now.

It has been trial and error with this card for sure, hair pulling at times.

As I mentioned before, I watercooled my 5970 which would constantly GSOD within 2 to 5 mins of playing any 3d game eyefiinty or not. No issues with desktop or 2d use. I thought it could be a cold bug.

I want to share my past results in case some of this might be similar to what you have running, and maybe help you out.

When I first got my XFX 5970 to replace my 5870, I had issues with drivers. I could install the original drivers from the disc included and had no problems, but as soon as I tried to install the intial beta2 and beta3 drivers that came out the day of release of this card back in November it would freeze during gaming or drop back to desktop. After some frustrating tests with a clean install of windows 7, I found that my Lavalys Everest program was causing the issue. With Evererst uninstalled, no more freezing or complete crash to desktop (but no GSOD yet) with the original install drive and further driver updates.

I decided to watercool my 5970 as it was way too hot with the original block and I could only reach 900MHz stable overclock. I wanted to reach 1GHz like I did with my old 5870. Happily I can say 1GHz was acheived. However,this is where my GSOD started to happen whether it was default speed or overclocked. Once the block was installed, 2 to 5 mins playing into any game, whether it played in crossfinity or one gpu eyefinty, hell even one monitor it would fail into the GSOD. Frustrated, I reinstalled the original heatsink/fan and wouldn't you know, it worked fine...no GSOD. So thinking I screwed up the install on the waterblock, reinstalled it 2 more times....and GSOD returned. My conclusion a few weeks ago after search the net, I believed I had the cold bug. The solution was to warm up the card up to 40c before running any games and I would see no GSOD...below that (around 35c) GSOD would return with fury. I had to turn down one fan to low speed and disconnect the other one on the dual rad just to maintain the warmer temp. At least my cooling system was quiet, but I hated the fact I had to warm up the card with furmark just so I could play a game and hope it doesnt cool down too much.

Then I stumbled onto something last week......

After installing 10.3 preview (or beta whatever) and using MSI afterburner to set my usual overclock settings and monitor temps, I used Dirt 2 (no patch installed) to benchmark after warming up the card. It was the first time I stumbling onto a new problem that could have been there before, but I was too pissed off about the GSOD to notice. There was what I could only describe microstuttering (about every 30 sec when running in crossfinity). I was like WTF? GSOD and now this? I verified with Heaven Benchmark that it also had this issue. Install 10.2 thinking it was the preview driver and the same issue was there for both benchmarks. It isn't something so obvious unless you are looking for it, but it was there.

To cut to the chase and hopefully you haven't fallen asleep already with this post, I found that it was my MSI afterburner (up to date version) running in the background that was causing the microstuttering issue (maybe when it was polling the card for info such as temps and clocks). The other thing I discovered by accident is that when I use afterburner to overclock/overvolt the card and then close afterburner before running a game, I had no GSOD whether I prewarmed the card or not (and overclocked or default speed). It has been a week now and still no GSOD.

I thought about further testing to replicate the issue.....but its come to a point that if it works, don't fuck with it. Plus, it was the only program I changed to stop running in the background, beside driver changes, nothing else was touched. I'm going to start enjoying my card now for once and hope that the GSOD doesn't return. I still get the odd Display port distortion on desktop during a cold boot, but I can live with that.
 
usernamexxx, that is exactly the card I purchased.

edit... Decided it was time to see if anyone might have any ideas on one problem that is plaguing me on all 3 comps and pretty sure it is a driver issue. All 3 of our computers have an ATI Theater 650 tv tuner card in them. Since installing the HD5850 video cards, we have lost analog tv on our tv tuner cards. The digital tv and fm radio still work perfectly fine. I have reinstalled my 4870 and went back to older drivers and then I can get analog tv back. But install the 5850, need to update drivers to get it to work, thus we loose our analog tv signal. After a ton of googling I have yet found a solution. Just kind of wondering if anyone else has a like setup and if you are having any problems or found any solutions.

edit 2 ... seems the usb 3.0 card also fixed my oldest daughters flickering problem. I played dirt 2 for a couple of hours and she played sims 3 for a few hours yesterday.
 
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ontariotl said:
I was one of the ones that submitted my problems with my HD5970 GSOD to Kyle.

AMD has yet to contact me, but I might be ok now.

It has been trial and error with this card for sure, hair pulling at times.

As I mentioned before, I watercooled my 5970 which would constantly GSOD within 2 to 5 mins of playing any 3d game eyefiinty or not. No issues with desktop or 2d use. I thought it could be a cold bug.

I want to share my past results in case some of this might be similar to what you have running, and maybe help you out.

When I first got my XFX 5970 to replace my 5870, I had issues with drivers. I could install the original drivers from the disc included and had no problems, but as soon as I tried to install the intial beta2 and beta3 drivers that came out the day of release of this card back in November it would freeze during gaming or drop back to desktop. After some frustrating tests with a clean install of windows 7, I found that my Lavalys Everest program was causing the issue. With Evererst uninstalled, no more freezing or complete crash to desktop (but no GSOD yet) with the original install drive and further driver updates.

I decided to watercool my 5970 as it was way too hot with the original block and I could only reach 900MHz stable overclock. I wanted to reach 1GHz like I did with my old 5870. Happily I can say 1GHz was acheived. However,this is where my GSOD started to happen whether it was default speed or overclocked. Once the block was installed, 2 to 5 mins playing into any game, whether it played in crossfinity or one gpu eyefinty, hell even one monitor it would fail into the GSOD. Frustrated, I reinstalled the original heatsink/fan and wouldn't you know, it worked fine...no GSOD. So thinking I screwed up the install on the waterblock, reinstalled it 2 more times....and GSOD returned. My conclusion a few weeks ago after search the net, I believed I had the cold bug. The solution was to warm up the card up to 40c before running any games and I would see no GSOD...below that (around 35c) GSOD would return with fury. I had to turn down one fan to low speed and disconnect the other one on the dual rad just to maintain the warmer temp. At least my cooling system was quiet, but I hated the fact I had to warm up the card with furmark just so I could play a game and hope it doesnt cool down too much.

Then I stumbled onto something last week......

After installing 10.3 preview (or beta whatever) and using MSI afterburner to set my usual overclock settings and monitor temps, I used Dirt 2 (no patch installed) to benchmark after warming up the card. It was the first time I stumbling onto a new problem that could have been there before, but I was too pissed off about the GSOD to notice. There was what I could only describe microstuttering (about every 30 sec when running in crossfinity). I was like WTF? GSOD and now this? I verified with Heaven Benchmark that it also had this issue. Install 10.2 thinking it was the preview driver and the same issue was there for both benchmarks. It isn't something so obvious unless you are looking for it, but it was there.

To cut to the chase and hopefully you haven't fallen asleep already with this post, I found that it was my MSI afterburner (up to date version) running in the background that was causing the microstuttering issue (maybe when it was polling the card for info such as temps and clocks). The other thing I discovered by accident is that when I use afterburner to overclock/overvolt the card and then close afterburner before running a game, I had no GSOD whether I prewarmed the card or not (and overclocked or default speed). It has been a week now and still no GSOD.

I thought about further testing to replicate the issue.....but its come to a point that if it works, don't fuck with it. Plus, it was the only program I changed to stop running in the background, beside driver changes, nothing else was touched. I'm going to start enjoying my card now for once and hope that the GSOD doesn't return. I still get the odd Display port distortion on desktop during a cold boot, but I can live with that.
Click to expand...

Nevermind......still not working....still have GSOD. I give up!! I'm going back to air cooling and possibly sell my card.
 
I think this article misses a key factor inhibiting adoption of Eyefinity by a lot of us: spousal inhibition. That is, my spouse nearly killed me when I got my 30" LG monitor, and she would definitely do me in if I purchased two more.

Fortunately she doesn't look inside my computer to see my dual 5970s... or I'd be on the run already.
 
I'm also a victim of the 5770 colourful crashing. I've tried tonnes of settings and ATI drivers and nothing has fixed it, I've been able to play games for 2 minutes to 8 hours uninterrupted.I purchased my card a couple weeks ago hoping for a fix and even tried to RMA my card at NCIX but they will not let me.
That aside, I just wanted to add that I have consistently been producing the coloruful screen of death while trying to transfer gigabytes of mp3s from my ipod to my hard drive via USB. Just sharing this information because before I'd not had a crash while just using 2d applications, only gaming.

My system: AMD Phenom 550 BE, XFX 5770, Gigabyte 770TA-UD3 (f2)
 
Ok I just came across a new problem today. I thought this problem was just some coding issue in Dirt2 but I had it happen tonight when playing Crysis Warhead. The problem happens in Dirt 2 when watching the replay and it swithces camera view, I get lines of multicolor dots for a split sec. It doesn't happen all the time but some times. Tonight playing Crysis Warhead, when it switched from the little video interview to the game I had it display those funky multicolored lines for a split sec. They don't last and they only show up for a split sec. Just long enough to notice them then they vanish.
I am running the preview 10.3 drivers.
Can someone else that has Dirt 2 and Crysis Warhead check your games out and see if you get the same thing. I know Dirt 2 does it on my daughters comps too because I tried the game on their comps last week. That is why I was just thinking it was a coding problem in the game.
 
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