4850X2

Someone said that there will be more HD 4850 X2 from other vendors so I think that ATI will support the card.
 
looks like a good card, might be the gtx 260 55nm competition in jan when i upgrade :cool:
 
I was inches away from buying this card, but all the reviews I read say it's the loudest card they've ever tested.
Plus it seems like only Sapphire is managing this, can you even use the official Cat drivers?

The ~$300 tag is amazing, nonetheless.
 
yes. i use the 8.12. i dont see what the problem could possibly be. somebody claims that amd/ati is saying "yes we will manufacture and sell this card, but refuse to support it in any way?". linkage?



firing squad -

"But boy is it a tremendous performer. In many tests it ran circles around the GeForce GTX 280, which is priced similarly to the 4850 X2. And the noise issue is easily fixable via software in the form of a working fan slider in either CCC or a third-party app like RivaTuner"


or an edit to the profiles.xml file, like all early owners of the hd4870 had to do for the first month.


edit my fan slider works. i dont know what the deal is with all the fud. at 20%, it is undetectable, and not in any way hot.

3126782833_48cb922b1e_o.jpg
 
I just got my HD 4850 X2 today via mysterious Sunday USPS delivery and I thought I'd add my initial impressions. (Post office making Sunday deliveries? Huh..go figure.) Anyway...I gotta say... After a few hours of use, i'm impressed with this card. It's certainly a long card....and it can get loud. But with Sapphire's 8.12 Cats downloaded from their website, I was able to lock the fan speed @ 20% percent, which isn't too bad. My GTX 260 is definitely quieter. The really annoying issue with the fan IMO is the slow revving-up and down. Locking it @ one speed really makes it quite tolerable. When focused on a game, the fan noise just gets tuned out, anyway.


What I was most impressed with, were the quite playable framerates in DX10 Crysis Warhead on Enthusiast / 1680 x 1050. Much better than a single GTX 260..I was pleasantly surprised by the scaling. (It's says "CUSTOM" in the screenshots, but only for setting r_texturesstreaming=0; it smooths out gameplay at the cost of more system RAM. Otherwise, all of the settings are Enthusiast):







tungt88 noticed a slowdown with VATS in Fallout 3. I ran through about half-hour and didn't see an issue with it myself....the game was very smooth with some dips in heavy fighting; Ultra settings, 8XAA /15XAF in-game setting:



3DMark Vantage was a bit disappointing. This card seemed to better than double the performance of my GTX 260 in some of the tests, while performing poorly in other tests for a score of P9101. My single GTX 260 scores around P12,000. The lower score seems to be due to the lack of PhysX acceleration and the fact that I have only a dual-core CPU.

Sins of a Solar empire seems to run much better with this card than a single GTX 260...I really notice it during heavy fighting with at least five-hundred various units slugging it out at one time. My GTX 260 will hover in the teens FPS, but the HD 4850 X2 will give a slightly better 20-25 fps....not sure if it's due to Crossfire X, more VRAM or what not..but Solar Empire likes this card. Same with SupCom Forged Alliance....very smooth with 8XAA in game setting. The GTX 260 is good also, but HD 4850 X2 runs it a bit better.


I like what i'm seeing so far, though I'm sure I have plenty of tweaking to do. The fact that it's a Sapphire card doesn't put me off. I like good price/performance no matter who makes or brands it...and I would consider this card over a GTX 280 easily.
 
tungt88 said:
Some impressions (I used FRAPS for fps measurements, games were run w/max settings except where noted, and my specs are in my sig):

***Go to Sapphire if you want updated 4850x2 drivers; I went to AMD's website for drivers the first time and had a very annoying time with driver errors until I read that AMD is not officially supporting this card driver-wise***

Fallout 3: Like the HardOCP review, frame rates were capped @ 60fps, but there was a lot of spikes performance-wise; the 4850x2 would go from 60fps to 20fps in all sorts of random moments, but especially when entering VATS, where fps as low as 15 could be seen (the VATS screen itself would take 10sec to load up). After unsuccessfully doing the following: (1)tinkering around with the settings, (2)playing around with the fallout.ini file, and (3)doing some research online, I decided to disable the in-game AA/AF settings and used CCC to get the settings to 8x/16x. Worked like a charm: the game actually looks better than before, there's minimal frame droppage now, and the spikes are minor; lowest fps was 40.

World of Warcraft (Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack): Initially had odd graphics difficulties: whenever I tried running @ 24-bit color/depth w/8x multisampling, I'd get a black screen. It finally took the reworked (for 4850x2) Catalyst 8.12 drivers @ Sapphire's site to get it working properly. I'm running in Maximized Windowed Mode, so I disabled Vertical Sync and Shadows (as they really bought down the fps to a crawl, around 20-30fps in some Northrend areas). It was a solid improvement: the fps now ranges from 40-195, with a rough average of around 60-85. (I am still running CCC wise on 8x/16x w/WoW).

Hope this mini look is of use :)
Click to expand...

If you turn on vsync AND triple buffering, you won't see those drastic fps drops (like 60 to 30, then to 15, etc.) With triple buffering, if it can't handle 60fps, but it can handle 58fps, it will only drop to 58 instead of down to 30.

Doing this will also drastically reduce CPU usage.
 
that's helluva a card it seems..just waiting for XFX to produce them, then shoot, shoot, bang, bang in Crysis & FarCry 2...
 
I upgraded to the hd4850x2 from a 8800GTS 640MB. The card arrived from Newegg (got the 15% cashback w/rebate for $241 shipped) on Friday night and was installed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get CCC and the 8.12 drivers from the Sapphire website to load properly to my XP64 machine. The drivers from the CD seem to work so far.

Aside from that I tried playing COD4 which looked fantastic. Devil May Cry 4 looked pretty good. Gears of War looked great. I had some framerate issues with NFS Undercover maxed (game crashes left and right).

Crysis, is still a resource hog and with everything turned up, I did have some framerate and artifacting.

Running all games in DX9. More testing to come with Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2.2.

When the drivers work, they work great. I did not try the 3D Mark Vantage yet.
PC Specs in sig.

Vanilla, what process did you use to load the 8.12 drivers to your machine? Did you just install the the drivers only when you upgraded from the CD or did you use anything like driver cleaner?
 
i just installed the drivers. i am running v64, and not having these kinds of problems. are you running v64 sp1? i have also run the latest 8.12, i think "hotfix" drivers no problem.
 
I'm currently running XP64. It has been somewhat good to me over the last year or so. Unlike when it first came out with hardly any driver support.

I am planning to load V64 sp1 in a few days.
 
I also bought the 4850x2, it arrived monday... That was the best news, i have vista 32 and have tried installing the disk drivers, 8.11, 8.12, along with the hotfix for crossfire 4850's. In total i've reinstalled drivers 9 times and spent countless hours since receiving this card monday trying to get the drivers to take and utilize both cores. I keep getting this error message after installation of drivers.

"At least one display adapter on the system has been disabled because its driver is not compatible with the driver for the VGA adapter."
 
Sherloc said:
I also bought the 4850x2, it arrived monday... That was the best news, i have vista 32 and have tried installing the disk drivers, 8.11, 8.12, along with the hotfix for crossfire 4850's. In total i've reinstalled drivers 9 times and spent countless hours since receiving this card monday trying to get the drivers to take and utilize both cores. I keep getting this error message after installation of drivers.

"At least one display adapter on the system has been disabled because its driver is not compatible with the driver for the VGA adapter."
Click to expand...

Try here:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php
 
Thats where i installed the vista 32bit drivers from ver 8.12 but it doesn't fix anything. I'm ripping my hair out.
 
I'm having my dad's friend who's a pc engineer come over and give it a whirl see if he can figure it out. If not monday i'm rma'ing and being very very sad. I'd hate to have to go to the green team, though i'm sure prices will drop next month with the coming of gtx 295.
 
Sherloc said:
I'm having my dad's friend who's a pc engineer come over and give it a whirl see if he can figure it out. If not monday i'm rma'ing and being very very sad. I'd hate to have to go to the green team, though i'm sure prices will drop next month with the coming of gtx 295.
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Apparently there's a large problem with 8.12 and some x2 cards.

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&id=20081211053957237&board_id=1&model=M3A32-MVP%20DELUXE/WIFI-AP&page=1&count=21

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=104549&enterthread=y&STARTPAGE=1

I found these threads to give different methods on how to fix the problem so hopefully that helps. Cuz the only other solution is sitting on your duff while ATI fixes it.
 
Ye, i tried the hotfix for two 4850 cards in crossfire but no avail. Well atleast i don't feel utterly alone now, seeing as it is a reported problem with many users. I think that one of those guys was on to something it has to be the chipset your using not the os your running cause it happens on 32 bit and 64 bit XP and Vista. As to whether i'm going to take any action myself today and try to fix it... probably... but saturday i'm bringing in the big dog and having him take a look at it, if anyone can fix it my dads friend charlie can, been in pc business 20-30 some years.
 
So, near my 15th time installing I had a breakthrough... Here's what i did hope it helps.
1) Downloaded Driver Sweeper
2) Restarted in Safe Mode
3) Uninstalled Both Display adapter and Video controller
4) Went into control panel and uninstalled ATI install manager
5) Opened driver sweeper and cleaned all ATI Display stuff
-Now here's where stuff got weird, i went to try and install ver 8.12 again yet every time the install wizard wouldn't let me download the display drivers, i tried from sapphires 8.12 and the ones on the AMD website... So what i did was finally just installed the install manager and CCC from sapphires website seeing as my pc kept telling me my drivers were up to date (even though none were installed). I then inserted my installation disk that came with the card. Previously when trying to install the disk driver it would cause my screen to go black and not recover (waited 7hrs one time) resulting in me to have to manually shut down. This time the drivers took for some reason unknown to me. So now i guess i'm sititng on 8.5 drivers, but i'll continue to mess around with it hopefully i don't get screwed over again. Oh btw i tried out COD4 with 32x Adaptive AA, triple Buffering, and Catalyst AI enabled, Holy F*** is all i can say, i came from a 8800gt g92 and the difference is night and day. Crysis Warhead enthusiast settings 2x AA getting 17 avg i think (1920x1080), though this is due to old drivers and cpu bottleneck (Q6600 stock 2.4Ghz). All and all i'm pleased but i would like to increase Warhead's performance i just don't wanna try installing 8.12 just to fall back into the stone age again.
 
So... Now i'm getting random crashes as are reported with the 8.5 series drivers... Fun fun... Well, i hear that Catalyst 8.11 is safe so i'm going to try (although i've tried numerous times) to install it... We'll see how things work out, i'm hopeful but this is crazy. My thoughts on why catalyst 8.5 has crashes is probably due to a problem in one core not switching to 3D mode.
 
After a few days of struggling to get Vista Ultimate to work correctly I have learned quite a bit.

When I first started loading up the OS. I had to operate with one stick or ram. There were quite a few BSOD's while trying to run two sticks of ram. Thank goodness it was a 2gig stick. I had to install a Vista patch to run multiple sticks. (I was tearing my hair out for 2 days).

Loaded up the CCC from Sapphire for Vista64. Got a black screen on reboot. Disabled Crossfire in safe mode and installed the ATI patch. Now it works.

Currently, I'm running a complete system now with Catalyst 8.12 successfully.

So far so good. I'll try loading Farcry2 and Crysis/Crysis2 and a few other games along with Photoshop and LR2.2.

See sig for setup.

Will post results in a few days hopefully.
 
I've gave it my all, I'm rather disgusted with ATI's driver support and have decide that it's no longer worth my time to try and get this card running correctly. I am rmaing my card sadly and will be going gtx 280 on the 8th or soon after as prices are about to drop.
 
That sucks Sherloc, I seem have to have my 4850x2 working without incident while playing Crysis Warhead.

NFS Undercover doesn't run worth a crap. I can live with that as the game was super buggy with my 8800GTS640.

One thing I have noticed is a lot of people in general do not have the patience to make sure their PC works like it's supposed to, that especially includes video cards.

I need some suggestions on which games to test with this card. Including ones suck with it.
 
Games you could test it on ito4u are Far Cry 2, Assasin's Creed (utilizes dx 10.1), Bio Shock, GTA IV (uses dx9), etc. I tried for a whole week to get that thing working averaging 5 hours a day, so thats what probably 30 hours or so, not including the day i rma'd it a week after i bought it.
 
I'm pretty sure my problem was my mobo, it is gateway proprietary. I'm not to upset though on the return i just read some articles DX 11 is gonna be out probably by Q2 so 6 months isn't long to wait for a new level of hardware compatiblity, i'll probably wait till then.
 
I've got my 4850x2 working running the drivers that came on the disk. I believe they are the 8.11's. The 8.12's from Sapphire work as well. I tried the 8.11's from Sapphire's site and when the install manager runs I don't get the option to install drivers. Same goes for any driver version from ATI's site. Hopefully ATI adds support to their official drivers, or at least sapphire keep up with theirs.
 
I'm hoping that ATI gets off their hands and releases version 9 drivers that fix a lot of issues that the current drivers experience. Hopefully we'll see something within a week or two. Hopefully...
 
ito4u said:
I'm hoping that ATI gets off their hands and releases version 9 drivers that fix a lot of issues that the current drivers experience. Hopefully we'll see something within a week or two. Hopefully...
Click to expand...

Not really a matter of sitting on their hands. They release drivers each month. Just have to wait for the next batch to be done.
 
I just loaded Far Cry2 and when I went to play it I started getting these weird horizontal artifacts streaming across the screen. Im pretty disapionted.
 
Duo Joe said:
I just loaded Far Cry2 and when I went to play it I started getting these weird horizontal artifacts streaming across the screen. Im pretty disapionted.
Click to expand...

That must be because obviously Sapphire makes defective cards. I must've got the one out of a hundred that actually works properly. Lucky me.
 
I'm actively considering buying the 4850 X2 for a new build I'm currently price-quoting. Do you guys still endorse this card? It honestly seems like the perfect card for what I need, both in terms of performance (especially in L4D, which I hope carries over to TF2) and price. It'd be a shame if lack of official ATi driver support killed it.
 
What chipset you using, and its a good card if u can get it to work. Honestly if you don't want the headache get the gtx 280 it's gonna drop like a rock price wise here in 2 days, right now its under 300.
 
Sherloc said:
What chipset you using, and its a good card if u can get it to work. Honestly if you don't want the headache get the gtx 280 it's gonna drop like a rock price wise here in 2 days, right now its under 300.
Click to expand...

Planning to get an Asus P5Q, so I'll be on a P45 chipset and running 64-bit Vista.

The trouble with the GTX280 is that ATi's offerings are demonstrably better with Source engine games, of which I tend to play a lot--mainly Team Fortress 2, but a lot of friends are big on Left 4 Dead now. I also plan to hook up my new build to a 1080p TV, which means an X2 card will help tremendously.

Buying a placeholder card and waiting for the spring launches isn't really an option. Either I buy everything now or wait three months and buy everything then.
 
Terpfen said:
I'm actively considering buying the 4850 X2 for a new build I'm currently price-quoting. Do you guys still endorse this card? It honestly seems like the perfect card for what I need, both in terms of performance (especially in L4D, which I hope carries over to TF2) and price. It'd be a shame if lack of official ATi driver support killed it.
Click to expand...

Someone said before that other vendors would release their HD 4850 X2 too, I think that when more vendors release the HD 4850 X2, ATI would eventually support the card officially. I think that vanilla_guerilla could use the official ATI driver with his card. I know that some people have problems with the card but some people are actually enjoying their cards trouble free.
 
alg7_munif said:
Someone said before that other vendors would release their HD 4850 X2 too, I think that when more vendors release the HD 4850 X2, ATI would eventually support the card officially. I think that vanilla_guerilla could use the official ATI driver with his card. I know that some people have problems with the card but some people are actually enjoying their cards trouble free.
Click to expand...

Right, and I understand that: I'm not under the impression that the majority of 4850 X2 owners are having problems or are unhappy. But there are enough driver problems to give me pause, especially since owners are dependent on Sapphire for driver updates rather than ATi. If I get a 4850 X2, I plan to keep it for upwards of three years: I don't want to buy now under the "hope" that Sapphire will issue regular driver updates, especially with this thing costing $330.
 
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