The HD 3850 AGP User Experience

Alright, looking for a little bit of advice here. I bought a DVI to HDMI cable and now output my PC to my TV at 1080p, and I have a 3.5mm to red/white audio output cable going from my Audigy 2 to the HDMI audio in jacks. For a variety of reasons, I would rather use the onboard sound on my Sapphire card, but I see no way to enable it; the only audio device listed is my Audigy 2.

Do I have to install the Sapphire drivers to get audio enabled on this card?
 
You don't have too, simply go to ATi driver download, choose your operating system etc, and once you are in the main download page to get the official drivers, look below where it says Optional Downloads components and Avivo for X1k series, click there and you will find the Optional Downloads tabs, and there you will find in the second line, the HDMI Driver for Radeon 2900 which works fine with the HD 3850. http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/hdmiaudio-xp

That's the link, and don't worry about the AGP support of the cards, I'm using the official ATi drivers with the force install, and everything including the Overdrive, Anti Aliasing etc works excellent...
 
Okay... installed the HDMI audio driver, rebooted, and nothing's changed. My computer still says the only sound hardware on my system is my Audigy 2.

Edit: I'm running XP SP3, if this makes any difference.
 
I got the card about 2 weeks ago before I built my new rig. I had a bitch of a time with drivr install in windows vista. Got there in the end. Brilliant card, plays assassins creed well!

Specs in sig.
 
I put the X1950 PRO back in my machine, the 3850 is not ready IMHO. HIS recommends I RMA the card, but I applied for the rebate so Newegg will not accept the return. :(
 
gflash said:
I put the X1950 PRO back in my machine, the 3850 is not ready IMHO. HIS recommends I RMA the card, but I applied for the rebate so Newegg will not accept the return. :(
Click to expand...

RMA has nothing to do with who sold you the card, but who made it. If HIS recommended you RMA, you deal with HIS, not Newegg. (Unless you're trying to divest yourself of the 3850 line entirely, which IMO is crazy.)
 
. . . . . I would like to get the card to work, but something is wrong, and I don't have the time/energy/resources to figure it out. This is what I know:

- The card installs OK, drivers load without a problem.
- All games (COD2, Doom 3, Half Life 2) run OK except COD 4. Everything except COD4
is an older game. COD4 kind of stutters with a cycle time about 1 second.
- During browsing, email , etc. everything seems to run OK, expect one core of my AMD
dual core runs about 50% busy on average, showing the same 1 second cycle time.
Something is up, but I don;t know what.
- With the X1950 pro card both cores idle most of the time.


This HIS card features HDMI audio, there might be something going on with that, the sound cuts out when the card stutters in game play.

Also, HIS support told me to deal with the retailer where I bought the card.
 
I did hear from HIS, I can RMA the card through the US distributor. I'm going to wait a bit to see if any new drivers are posted in the next week or so.
 
I installed the official Cat 8.5 drivers on my card and they work fine (Using the forced install of course). I just found that they released the 8.5 AGP Hotfix.
 
Another HDMI audio question... do I need to have the DVI to HDMI dongle attached before the system sees the 3850's onboard sound? At this point I can't even get the damn thing to show up in the Device Manager. I'm using a generic DVI to HDMI cable, so I'm holding out hope that when I get the official adapter later this week, using it will magically cause my system to recognize the onboard sound.

(Installing the ATI HDMI Audio drivers doesn't do anything.)
 
No, you don't have to, my OS can see the device without connecting the adapter, but for some reason my friend's Sapphire HD 3850 doesn't show the HDMI Audio on the device manager, does the sapphire version comes without HDMI Audio?
 
It didn't come with an adapter, but every spec list I've seen says that it does audio over HDMI.

Edit: it seems only the PCI-E version of Sapphire's HD3850 does HD Audio. AGP owners--like me--are screwed. Anyone care to buy my HD3850 for $150?
 
Phew, I was lucky that I chose the HIS version, if you sell the Sapphire card at 150 with shipping included it's gonna be great, otherwise it will just cost the same in Newegg and it's brand new.
 
Would this video card work in an ASUS K8N-E Deluxe? I'm only asking because i read the 3850 has some different type of power connection on it from the standard 4 pin power socket.
 
Krelm said:
Would this video card work in an ASUS K8N-E Deluxe? I'm only asking because i read the 3850 has some different type of power connection on it from the standard 4 pin power socket.
Click to expand...

I have the Sapphire card, and it requires two 4-pin connectors.
 
I don't think I remember seeing it posted here yet (25 pages is a LOT to remember!), so I'll add my $0.02:

After attempting nearly every driver under the sun to get my PowerColor HD 3850 AGP working without random BSoDs, reboots, or no signal, I finally discovered that setting it to AGP 4x mode was the magic bullet, allowing me to use the latest (8.5 hotfix) official ATI Catalyist!
I would imagine setting it to 4x in the BIOS would be the ideal solution, but alas, mine wouldn't let me, so doing so in ATI Tray Tools was my next best option. To get my computer to reliably load Windows in the process, however, I had to change the driver of my PCI-to-AGP interface in Device Manager to the standard PCI-to-PCI interface (essentially making the AGP bus run as PCI). After that, load up ATTools & set 4x AGP, reboot, reinstall your chipset's normal PCI-to-AGP driver, and you're all set! I haven't seen any significant performance hit from running in 4x rather than 8x.

And now for my QUESTION:
Does anyone know what these cards' jumper settings are?? Right where you'd normally see a Crossfire interface on a PCIe, the AGP version has two jumpers. What do these control? Anyone?
 
@pyrocrickett

Are you, by chance, using a Via chipset?
Or more specifically, the KT400/KT400A/KT600?
 
Hmm...

Via chipsets seem to have major problems with AGP 8x (BSOD etc), was apparent with my GeFX 5600. I know it happened on the KT400/A/600, but seems the 800 isn't spared too.
 
Anyone try the regular CAT 8.6 from the ATI website released on the 19th?
 
I did, had to force feed them... but seems to be working alright. Didnt do much testing out last night..
 
thanks for the hotifx addy.

dont know about you all, but my games look better. Seems textures are tighter and just look better.
 
I tried installing the card one more time with the latest hotfix. This time I ran the cpu monitor before installing any drivers and found one core was running about 20% busy all the time. This is the same behavior as before but I thought it was a driver problem, now I'm not so sure.
The mobo is a DFI Ultra 3 with an nVidia nForce 3 chipset. Maybe there is something to be done with the AGP settings in bios, but I would not know where to begin. The board is at the latest revision bios.
 
Can you check task manager and see which service is running 20% cpu usage? Make sure you have .net 2.0 with patches before you install the card.
 
I did do a process view, the only one that popped in and out was some sql process (I don't have MS SQL installed, but I think it is used by the OS).

I will check to see what version of .net is installed.
 
I have .net 2.0 installed already. The process I saw jumping up in task manager was sqlservr.exe. According to Add/Remove programs, it is part of my video editing software.
 
I just reformatted recently and installed Cat 8.6. I tried launching 3dmark06 to see if there were any gains. But it refused to start, because the driver only support ps2.0 shaders and downwards. The witcher and CoH had black textures etc. CoH just ctd's when I tried running the built in benchmark. Oh well, back to sapphire 407 drivers:confused:
 
gflash said:
I tried installing the card one more time with the latest hotfix. This time I ran the cpu monitor before installing any drivers and found one core was running about 20% busy all the time. This is the same behavior as before but I thought it was a driver problem, now I'm not so sure.
The mobo is a DFI Ultra 3 with an nVidia nForce 3 chipset. Maybe there is something to be done with the AGP settings in bios, but I would not know where to begin. The board is at the latest revision bios.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem. My solution was to disable Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio in the Device Manager (in System Devices).
 
Dazzyon . . . . . was this Windows XP? I forgot about possible sound device issues.
 
Yes, Windows XP. Also with nForce3 ultra.

I think the problem is that the nForce3 chipset doesn't support HD audio. The driver is probably trying to pass trough HD audio (for HDMI) to the grapics card...
 
My sapphire 3850 bsods randomly whenever I play cs:source, I have the 8.6 hotfix installed and the card is overclocked to whatever CCC capped it at. I notice that the card only bsods whenever I just have atis CCC running but whenever I turn on Rivatuner and manually set fan speed to 100% I don't experience the problem anymore. Any thoughts?

BTW
mobo is ecs kv2 lite.
currently x2 3800+ toledo is at 2.5
 
Then seems that the card is overheating. I heard that the thermal paste used on the sapphire card is a POS, tried to remove the cooler and put some AS5 or Diamond Thermal Paste and give it a try.
 
Yeah probably, but i pretty much gave up on CCC and just switched to using rivatuner to monitor my gpu.
What kind of programs are you guys using to test your overclock stability?
Right now I'm tweaking core/ram speeds and testing them through 1-2 hr long furmark benchmark. So far gotten up to 830/1030 (2060) stable.
 
I managed to edit the BIOS to activate Powerplay for HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 AGP Users. I flashed my videocard BIOS and now Powerplay works like a charm. Also I managed to increase the fan duty slighly, so it keep itself cooler. I used the RBEditor, and selected Look Up Table instead of Transfer Function which made my GPU to reach as high as 90C when overclocked to 800MHz, now barely reaches 82C and in a room temperature of over 85F when using ATi Tool, Ozone3D and ATi Tray Tool graphics test. If you are interested let me know. Now I'm experimenting to see if I'm able to change it's DeviceID so it can use the official driver without inf modification, forced install or using the erratic Hotfix that I never liked. Wish me luck!!
 
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