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4870 1gb card startup problems

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Phenol312

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 27, 2007
Messages
103
Hi

I just replaced my aging 8800gts 640 with a new sapphire 1gb 4870. I've uninstalled hte nvidia drivers, run driver cleaner, and even gone so far as to reset my bios but I keep having this strange problem. I power on the computer and it hangs. like no video output. the bios error indicator on my motherboards shows a 2b error which is a video bios load error. Upon resetting the computer it boots fine. Why would it not load properly on a cold start? How can i fix this? Anyone else have this problem?
 
IT seems to me in my perusing through forums and video cards of late that people with 1 gigabyte cards whether nvidia or ati have been having such problems, Im sorry a solution doesnt come to mind but I do recall seeing this in both the nvidia and ati camps which leads me to believe its a windows problem or perhaps the combined ram from graphics card and system memory exceeds the total amount acceptable to windows perhaps??? are you running xp?
 
if you read his post carefully you'll see it has nothing to do with the OS.

I'd try reseating the card. Maybe clean out the PCI-E slot with canned air.
 
I tried resetting the bios last night and this morning it came up ok. the only thing i notice now is that Vista (64 bit) hangs a little while at a black screen (maybe 15-20 seconds) after the "welcome" screen disappears.
 
Phenol312 said:
I tried resetting the bios last night and this morning it came up ok. the only thing i notice now is that Vista (64 bit) hangs a little while at a black screen (maybe 15-20 seconds) after the "welcome" screen disappears.
Click to expand...

Well, Vista 64 does take a while to boot for the first time. When you type your password (I'm assuming you have a multi-user system set up), as soon as the "select a user" screen comes up, Vista is still loading stuff to memory, so it's not unusual for the transition from the "enter password" screen to your desktop, to take a while.

If it's just that you're seeing, I wouldn't worry too much for now.
 
hey just wanted to post back and say everythings A OK now.

for anyone wondering about the 1gb 4870 its great. i paid 300 after shipping and handling and i see a huge difference from my old GTS. i can pretty much max out clear sky at 1920x1200 although i get BSODs about locked pages but that has more to do with the glitchy nature of the game than the card.

about to go over to new egg and shop for some cooling solutions.
 
Got this message on startup just now...appears to appear at random. Anyone have any ideas on how to get rid of it?

"Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed."
 
I have a 4870 1gb from diamond and its great. Not having the problems your having tho. What are your futuremark scores for 03/05/06 and vantage?
 
try setting the system to default and see if you are still getting errors (you have it overclocked)
 
yeah the card and system are both overclocked but the OC is stable and the card is just oc'ed through CCC.

after it BSODs the first time it always boots up ok the second time.

gives a hex code and a file atikmdag.sys or something.
 
doesnt sound stable to me....

either way, i got those bsods and crashes with 8.9. I went back to 8.7 and everything is fine again. 8.9 drivers blow.
 
i have a diamond 1GB 4870 , soon as i enter ATI CCC with ANY version of Cat's (Vista 64BIT) screen garbles up ... an memory dumps ... to atikmdag.sys too ...

im building this system for a friend , tried it in 2 motherboards
Gigabyte G31 MATX board & MSI 750i SLI

rma?
 
my particular problem has disappeared thankfully. Although Clear Sky remains unplayable due to some massive memory leak grr. :mad:

anyway...

I would say to RMA but first try it with XP or any other version of vista. Have you considered it could be PSU or memory related?
 
I'm using it with a 850Watt Xigmatec (SP) PSU

Memory Wise , i'm fine cause im testing with my own personal pc an it also messes up with JUST the 4870

i have no problems with a 9600gt , 4850 , GTX 260 in this machine
just this damn diamond 4870 GRRR
 
still having some sort of problem with my card. seem to only happen with clear sky. Ill be playing the game and itll crash to desktop. I go to end XRengine from the taskmanager and i get a BSOD saying process has locked pages. Computer does a dump but doesnt shut down or restart. I have to press the power button upon which i get a 2b POST code (invoke video bios). At this point i have to power off/on my PSU to get the machine up and running but at this point the mobo defaults to setting my processor back to 2.66ghz for some reason so i have to redo all my overclocking. its really annoying. :mad:

should i call sapphire about this? do i have a defective card?
 
I emailed sapphire support with my problem and this was the response i got

"Sounds like a bad card, can you go through RMA service through them? They should be able to help you with your request."

:mad:
 
Ok sapphire tech support is useless their idea of support isn't helping. Does anyone here think flashing the bios might solve this problem???
 
Just wanted to update this:

I am still getting the random BSoD on startup from this card. What happens is that I get to the vista loading screen and it runs for a few seconds. The screen then jumps to a BSOD, does a mem dump and restarts. When it restarts it hangs at my POST screen. At this point I hit "delete" to enter bios and exit out which restarts the computer and then it boots up flawlessly.

What bothers me the most is that this isnt a constant issue. I might not see it for a week and then i might see it every day for hte next three days. Once I am in vista the card is flawless. No problems gaming for hours on end. It's just this damn startup problem. Is anyone else having this problem still? I'm running the lastest 8.11 drivers.
 
Yeah, I've been getting this error with my 512mb 4870 VisionTek. Just BSoDs on boot, restarts, then boots up fine. It will go for about week and then decide to do it every time I reboot or cold boot the machine. I've had this problem since August. Reformatted last Friday (11/28/08) with a fresh install of the 8.11 and still no go.

Running 8.11 Cats

Asus P5Q-EM
Q9450 @ Stock 2.66Ghz
OCZ 2x2GB DDR2-1000 @ Stock
VisonTek 4870 512MB @ Stock
2x Seagate 320GB 2x Seagate 750GB
LiteOn Sata DVD-RW 16x
Antec TQP-850 850W PSU
 
What pisses me off is that ATi says that if your motherboard isn't on the microsoft approved list it becomes your own problem. This is garbage so many people are having this problem and ATi is just ignoring the problem. To me it sounds like a vista + Ati problem. I've heard that renaming Atikmdag.sys in safe mode to atikmdag.xxx (just a random suffix) will solve the problem. I am wary of trying this myself, however.

If my rig wasn't stable then it would fail during load ... not during startup. My ip35 pro has a bios code display error so i can provide more info (which i might have already posted here) that i halt on error 2b. According to my manual that would be "failure to invoke video bios."
 
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