The HD 3850 AGP User Experience

ok, i was looking through the settings in the catalyst control panel. i found this option under the avivo color control tab "Use Extended Display Identification Data (EDID)" unchecked it, and the grey pixel corruption disappeared immediately. odd how it didn't do this when i connected the monitor to the other dvi port. but at least i figured out the problem, hopes this info helps someone else.
 
Really can be dependent on your case cooling. But if you are not OC'd at all you could be idling at less than 40ºC with great cooling. With some not good case cooling you could be idling at over 50ºC. There is huge variance and cooling the sucker down helps at lot. Minimum should be a 120mm fan cooling it from some angle. Load temps can vary from around 60ºC in a good air flow case to 90ºC+ in a hot box.
 
Sapphire 3850 agp. 43' idle with clocks at 684/889
Highest I've seen temp was 59.
Seems cool enough.
 
So I passed my powercolor to a buddy and hooked myself up with a sapphire. Put the 8.12's on it. Overdrive tested it to 709/939[1868]. Interestingly the default on this card was 668/829 which I know is standard I just I was under the impression Sapphire defaulted to 700 on the core. No matter.

I was interested if the Sapphire cooler would not be as effective as the fancy PowerColor. It basically is as effective despite being plain jane looking. Still haven't seen 70ºC
 
Just brought an old Dell 2.4ghz P4 based pc home from work. Saved it from the trash bin.

The pc is running fine and Prime95 and SuperPi stable.
Was considering getting the HIS 3650 for it since I have heard it works with stock PSU.

Anyone disagree?

I have heard of people getting by with the 250-300w PSU and the 3850.... but I'm not wanting to risk it.
 
Dang it, these 8.12's broke my overclocking again! I can't OC in CCC, ATI Tray Tools, or RivaTuner!

Is there a trick for getting it to stick? RivaTuner used to work when all else wouldn't, but now it's not budging from the 297 core, 860 something memory speeds.... well, when gaming it budges, but it just goes to stock speeds. My OC settings pass the test in Rivatuner but when I hit apply they reset back to either 297 or 335 core.

I definitely need a good OC combined with a better OC from one of my CPUs and my memory to be able to game happily through 2009 @ 720P.
 
I just placed my Zalman GWB3850/3870 waterblock on the Sapphire 3850 AGP ( On a Reserator 2 loop which also cools the CPU and Northbridge). To my horror the mosfet cooling block totally doesn't fit; the mosfets on the Sapphire are different from the reference design. So I ended up taking the standard aluminium grill; sawed off the fins and finished the surface, placed that back onto the mosfetss and placed the Zalman mosfet cooling block on top of that, glued tight using Arctic Cooling thermal compound. Currently the stock speed is 29°, after 1 hour of intense 3D gaming it ran up to 39°, at 770/950 clock speeds, amazing! the reserator felt fairly cool considering the circumstances. Looks like I've got plenty of headroom, I'll see how far I can push this card.
 
ragejg said:
Dang it, these 8.12's broke my overclocking again! I can't OC in CCC, ATI Tray Tools, or RivaTuner!

Is there a trick for getting it to stick? RivaTuner used to work when all else wouldn't, but now it's not budging from the 297 core, 860 something memory speeds.... well, when gaming it budges, but it just goes to stock speeds. .
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What, nobody with a 3850 has run into this?

I'm uninstalling CCC and re-doing my VIA drivers (GART included) to see if SOMETHING will work.
 
ragejg said:
What, nobody with a 3850 has run into this?

I'm uninstalling CCC and re-doing my VIA drivers (GART included) to see if SOMETHING will work.
Click to expand...

I didn't run into this and I OC'd my HD3850 AGP under the 8.12 cats and RivaTuner 2.22 to 775/1075 then I flashed it to ( the rounded down ) 769/1071 and it runs perfectly.
 
Has anyone tried using their AGP 3850 with the Windows 7 beta 1 (build 7000)? I'm using the 64-bit beta & cannot get the drivers loaded. I've tried using ATI's Win7 beta Catalyst preview drivers, the Vista x64 drivers (8.12 & 8.11), both via the installer & Device Manager-forcing the INF & in every case after a reboot I have gotten either a Device Manager Code 43 (driver disabled from reporting an error/failure) or no display (black screen) after login screen in followed by an automatic reboot. I had the same (similar at least) blank screen/rebooting problem with XP (x86) that I fixed by dropping my AGP bus from 8x to 4x, but I cannot get the driver loaded & ATI Tray Tools running at the same time to make the change. Any help?
 
Hi guys, I just got the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 AGP. My motherboard (MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum) doesn't like it, it stops on CPU initialization stage (according to the D-Bracket 2). I upgaded the PSU with a new 520W one but still same problem...Please help!

PS: I heard that VIA chipsets have don't like Radeon 3850 in contrast with Intel ones. Workarounds like setting AGP to 4x are supposed to fix the problem. Have you heard anything similar?? Thanks a lot.
 
So I've ordered a Sapphire 3850 and will be arriving tomorrow in the mail, I want to bring back my p4 system back to life. I have winxp pro (32-bit) installed... Anyone know which drivers I should get for this card or which drivers work best?
 
I have had a Sapphire 3850 agp for about 4 months now and after using 8:10's first then 8:12's I'm back to 8:10's.
P4 [email protected]
Finished COD World at War with the 8:10's. Playing Doom 3 and Dirt off and on.
I had stability issues after awhile with 8:12's. Maybe it's just me.
I took out the card and scraped the goo off and replaced with Artic Silver and lowered idle to 40-41 from 43-and haven't bothered checking temps when cranked cause everthing is working fine.
Good Luck
 
Cool, thanks for the info.

It arrived in the mail yesterday so I went to try it out, only to find out it wasn't working. It got as far as the POST screen with the text all scrambled. Is this a sign of PSU failure? That was my guess anyway so I went on to order the Antec Basiq Power 550 Watt which seems to have a nice 1 x 6+2 PCI-E connector, so I won't need to use the adapter cable that came with the card. It also has a 1 x 8 Pin 12V connector but I'm not supposed to be using that for the video card, right?

http://www.antec.com/ec/productDetails.php?ProdID=06550

Should be arriving tomorrow so I'll let you guys know how this will work out. I'm upgrading my p4 2.66ghz system to be my 2nd main rig, next to my i7 rig that will be coming in a little while later. I hope with these upgrades it'll last me another good 1-2years. Planning to get a nice CM690 case, and some extra RAM, and possibly an IDE HDD 500gb 16mb cache. 2 rigs will hopefully increase my work productivity although I'm not too sure yet what the exact setup will be.

For the video card, I noticed there is an AGP Hotfix out for 8.12 as well:
http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=31625

If that doesn't work out I'll switch back to 8.10.
 
I use the Hotfix drivers-all versions.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that.

Just to comment on this ATI card.
I've been an Nvidia guy since day one.
Such as TNT 16mb, TNT Ultra, GF2 GTS Pro 64mb, GF3Ti, "3" GF4Ti4200's,
6600GT and last one before the 3850 a 7600GT.

I bought this ATI agp card to prolong the gaming life of my P4 system and it has basicly done just that.
However, I have had more problems with this card than any of the Nvidia cards mentioned above.
VPU recoverys,freezes, lockups, blank screens, weird white lines around all bodies of water in CoD5, driver issues such as overclocking not sticking etc.
I actually took this card out and reinstalled the old 7600GT untill I wanted to finish CoD5 and play DIRT so I reinstalled it. It has enabled me to play some games I couldn't play with an Nvidia card but it's been a pain in the ass.

When I finally upgrade to a new system it will have an Nvidia gpu and I''ll put the 7600gt back in the P4 so my wife won't be annoyed.
Good Luck
 
pyrocrickett said:
Has anyone tried using their AGP 3850 with the Windows 7 beta 1 (build 7000)? I'm using the 64-bit beta & cannot get the drivers loaded. I've tried using ATI's Win7 beta Catalyst preview drivers, the Vista x64 drivers (8.12 & 8.11), both via the installer & Device Manager-forcing the INF & in every case after a reboot I have gotten either a Device Manager Code 43 (driver disabled from reporting an error/failure) or no display (black screen) after login screen in followed by an automatic reboot. I had the same (similar at least) blank screen/rebooting problem with XP (x86) that I fixed by dropping my AGP bus from 8x to 4x, but I cannot get the driver loaded & ATI Tray Tools running at the same time to make the change. Any help?
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+1

I was thinking of trying out Windows7 this weekend on my old rig but was worried about the drivers on this card. Anyone try it?
 
Sapphire HD3850 AGP owners, what are you maximum overclocks on the core? Does the softmod really work on those cards?
 
I have the HIS HD 3850 AGP and need some help. I would like to get the most out of my card but after looking at the TechPowerUp tool I would most likely destroy my card. I have had my card overclocked to: GPU 770 and Memory 950. My main concern is the fan speed. I have read that this is a weak point with the card. Has anyone had overclocking success and has backup there BIOS I can flash my card with?
 
I think i just ruined an open box PowerColor HD 3850 AGP, or may have.

when i got it i had some of those random blocky things on the screen sometimes even at post and played around with drivers and did a format re-install of XP and had things working with cat 9.1 hotfix watched some downloaded HD video on new 22 in monitor at 1680 x 1050 beautiful, played a couple hours of Dead Space just great wonderful graphics compared to old vid card, then crashed in Dead Space and from then on and from then on whatever i did i got four lines of blocky on the monitor and crash crash crash just in windows.

I have 15 amps on a 12v rail and i guess the card wants 18 amps. it was open box but if it wasn't dead when i got it it is now i think. i could probably return it to newegg its still in the 30 days u get for open box but i feel kind of bad. the open box are only around once in a while and i did it but this time i'm getting a new one

does anyone think i would be totally screwing them if i sent it back?
 
seems you think you are in that you made this post morter... Power supplies is often the issue with these cards.. why go through the trouble of sending it back if you havent totally checked it out. But do so within the 30 days I would say even 15days just to be safe.

if the card wont work send it back.. if it does work keep it and enjoy
 
LordVampyre said:
seems you think you are in that you made this post morter... Power supplies is often the issue with these cards.. why go through the trouble of sending it back if you haven't totally checked it out. But do so within the 30 days I would say even 15days just to be safe.

if the card wont work send it back.. if it does work keep it and enjoy
Click to expand...

ur right i guess i think i would be. maybe this wasn't the place for my post probably should have made my own post titled ..... "i think i just ruined a vid card should i stick it to newegg anyway".....

Thanks for the advice on the power supply anyway.
i have another PS 450 wats with 25 amp on a 12v rail i'll have to go 50 mi though to a fry's store though to get a 2 molex to 6pin power plug - put in other power supply - plug it all in and see if things work.

i will have 2 cd drives also pulling power off that rail but i "think" i'll still have 18amp left for the card and see if it works then or if i have broke it for real.

it is just that it did work great for 5 or 6 hours underpowered apparently once i got some drivers kind of right. Anyway forget it if its broke i'll just eat it cause i prolly broke it.

i guess what i'm asking does anyone think that PS will do the trick. i know it will be like the min but im not adding anything else other than the 2 cd drives on that rail no fans HDD or whatever or do i need a different PS.

thanks

i really should made this a different post
 
just as an update: i rebooted to safe mode, removed ati drivers, hooked up different power supply, pulled out the x1650 agp and put it the 3850 agp restarted put the 9.2 hotfix drivers, and had no problems that i could see untill i tried to play Dead Space. The screen would artifact out, black screen, vpu recover would kick in, then game would come back after about 1 or 2 min. then 1 min later same thing then 3rd time black screen and no comeing back untill i restarted. I did this twice.

i called power color and actually got a tec support person and one of the first things he asked is what motherboard (i have a via K8M800 MICRO AM2) and as soon as i said that he said there was nothing i could do its the board drivers and they can't help me.

i was wondering if anyone knew a fix for this

thanks a lot
 
morter said:
just as an update: i rebooted to safe mode, removed ati drivers, hooked up different power supply, pulled out the x1650 agp and put it the 3850 agp restarted put the 9.2 hotfix drivers, and had no problems that i could see untill i tried to play Dead Space. The screen would artifact out, black screen, vpu recover would kick in, then game would come back after about 1 or 2 min. then 1 min later same thing then 3rd time black screen and no comeing back untill i restarted. I did this twice.

i called power color and actually got a tec support person and one of the first things he asked is what motherboard (i have a via K8M800 MICRO AM2) and as soon as i said that he said there was nothing i could do its the board drivers and they can't help me.

i was wondering if anyone knew a fix for this

thanks a lot
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My only thought would be, a clean format with the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard installed.

I know that sounds rough, but that's all I can think of....

BTW, the tech support guy asking you which motherboard you have followed immediately by "Oh, it's the motherboard.... We can't help you", sounds like a cop out. I'd call and talk to them again.

Lastly, my Sapphire 3850 started giving me trouble after the first two months. I popped my x1950pro back in the box and plan to RMA the 3850.... I just haven't gotten around to it and I'm fairly uncertain about Sapphire's RMA policies/procedures. Anybody got any info for me there?
 
doing a rma though sapphire is like having root canals on all your teeth at the same time... they are horrid.

Hate to say it but I think that cards a gonner moter.. Id rma that puppy real fast.
 
LordVampyre said:
doing a rma though sapphire is like having root canals on all your teeth at the same time... they are horrid.
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Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I was afraid of this.

I may just drop the money and pick up a Powercolor 3850 and say f*ck it.

I haven't decided yet....

I will call definitely call Sapphire first though. Probably this coming week.
 
Just wanted to say thanks to LordVampyre for the help. People don't have to post responses but someone usually does in here and the posts have some thought in them thanks a bunch.

I sent the PowerColor card back and ordered a PCI-e board and Sapphire 4670 from Newegg. I'm thinking it should be similar in performance to a 3850. I would like to get a better card but i just can't afford it. i got both of these items for $116.98 before tax and shipping and all that which is about $7.00 more than an AGP 3850 on newegg so i guess i have kind of given up on the 3850.

ASRock A780FullHD AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail = $56.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157149

SAPPHIRE 100255HDMI Radeon HD 4670 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card - Retail = $59.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102820

It probably does seem kind of silly getting a 4670 but money is really an issue for me' my family would probably kill me for spending this much money if they knew. Don't tell

but any way thank you for the advice, I appreciate it a lot. I've ben lurking in these forums sence 2001 i think and if you look you find a lot of solid advice. I mean i remember back then, it doesn't work anymore but for a couple years if you mis-typed hardocp in the address bar with
...hardopc... you would end up at a girls of the farm p0rn place..... that was a pain and about once a month i would end up doing that lol...
 
morter said:
It probably does seem kind of silly getting a 4670 but money is really an issue for me' my family would probably kill me for spending this much money if they knew. Don't tell
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I hear ya, man. My 3850 arrived today -- after I had submitted the order the other night, I sat there and just got sick to my stomach from the guilt, knowing that I shouldn't be spending the money. But, I was worried that they might discontinue these cards soon and I want to make my system last as long as possible...would love a new system but there's no way I'm going to be able to afford it for a while. Then again, you probably ended up doing the smarter thing with the PCI-E mobo and card that I never even really thought about. D'oh! I even had to spend a little extra to get a new power supply because of this card's power requirements :(

Sorry to hear that the 3850 didn't work for you; I've got my fingers crossed that my nForce3 board doesn't cause any problems -- maybe it won't because I only have a single core.
 
yep i went through kind of the same thing i had to get another power supply also.

From what i hear there are problems with my via motherboard, K8M800. Via isn't making new drivers for it anymore and apparently the 3XXX cards don't like via's AGP 3.0 mode so i tryed turning it off, and turning the bus from 8x to 4x all kinds of different ati drivers, 2 different fresh installs of xp home all to no avail then but i'll tell you i had the card working and played Dead Space for like 2 hours and the difference in graphics was fantastic.

I don't think Nforce 3 boards have the same problems as via boards do though when it worked it was pretty bad ass i'll tell you
 
Haha, oh man...what a disappointment this turned out to be.

First, after I installed the card I was plauged with the infamous high CPU usage bug -- just sitting on the Windows desktop idling, the CPU usage was fluctuating between 35-50%, and none of the processes in the Task Manager tab were responsible. I figure it's a driver related issue. I tried some games and, while they were playing a little faster than my 6800, it wasn't the big jump I was hoping for.

I played around with the AGP aperture settings in the BIOS, eventually settling on 128 MB and that seemed to fix it, but then the same games had even worse performance. Something happened to cause the framerate to halve from what it was initially. So I set the aperture back to 256 MB. CPU usage still looked okay, but the framerates were still horrible. :confused:

I uninstalled and reinstalled the nVidia GART driver (v4.4.0). Nope. Then I uninstalled all the ATI junk, completely wiped everything out with Driver Cleaner Pro, and reinstalled the drivers fresh. Okay, that seemed to do it. No CPU usage bug, and framerates were back to initial framerates (still disappointingly low, though).

Except -- when I turned on my PC this morning, inexplicably (I didn't change anything from when it was working fine last night) the high idle CPU usage bug is back. Ugh.

Second problem -- I cannot get custom resolutions to work with my monitor (FW900) no matter what. I've tried just about everything, from manually editing the registry to changing it through PowerStrip, but 1600x1024@85hz will not work for me. It keeps outputting that res at 1280x1024 :confused: 1600x1024@60hz works just fine, though :confused:

I have to say, I was already missing my nVidia card as soon as I took a look at that ghastly Catalyst Control Center -- it reminded me that I HATE ATi's drivers. So clunky and confusing. And the colors do not look right to me...after using my 6800 for four years, the ATi card just looks washed out. Sure, I can tweak the color saturation, but it still does not look right. Dark games like Quake 2 have areas that looks too bright, for instance. I guess it's probably the gamma differences between the two companies that I remember from so many years ago; guess they never changed.

Oh well, I am tired of messing with all of this. I gave it a shot, but unfortunately it does not look like it's meant to be.
 
It gets even better...

I put my old card back in, and now it's artifacting all over the place. First after playing a game for a couple of minutes, now even in Windows. Even screws up the characters during POST. Doesn't matter if it's cooled off for ten seconds or an hour. Also seems intermittent during 2D stuff. I thought it might be that the new power supply was defective, but it still does it with the old one, too.

Ah, this is one of those times where I really wish I didn't fool with anything, and just left well enough alone. :(
 
wow what a drag. well now that u are all screwed up maybe you could format re-install with ati card in and see if that would work for you. i had all kinds of problems on an n-force2 board when i switched to a radeon x1650 pro agp from a gforce 5700 with xp home.

i ended up haveing to do fresh install of xp with the new card in. installed all chipset drivers, all windows updates, then got .net 1.1 and all it's updates then got 2.0 wich has now turned into 3.5 (wich from what i hear has 2.0 included with all its servace packs) and then things worked fine. i don't know why.

also i tryed getting just .net 2.0 and ccc was all screwed up. so i thaught ok meybe 1.1 first then 2.0 from windows update and then things were fine. so maney strainge little things i had to go through to get things to work it took me 3 afternoons. and what if i hadn't thaught of doing 1.1 befor 2.0 wow i was frusterated over all that
 
I have a brand new sapphire 3850 in the box for sale if anyone is interested. it is an rma from newegg and I dont need it because i did an upgrade, so pm me if anyone is interested. I only posted here because i dont have enough posts for sale section
 
Is there any way to increase the overclock limit in Overdrive? In Overdrive in the CCC the max is 720 core. 950 memory. I can overclock to 800+ core 1000+ memory in rivatuner, but you have to set the clocks each time you play a game since you can't just change the 3D clock. Any help would be appreciated.
 
I've got it sorted it out with some hotkeys through rivatuner. Now I have another question. Is it safe to drop the core/memory below the 2D clocks of 297/828? Is it possible to damage a video chip by setting the clocks too low?
 
I'm sorry for posting on a relatively inactive forum while being new to HardForum at the same time. I've got a Sapphire HD3850 AGP arriving tomorrow ($95 after rebate from Newegg so I couldn't resist) and I've been researching the driver install issues until my eyes feel like they're going to bleed. The system i am going to install the card on is based on the the Intel 875P chipset (Supermicro P4SCT +II) and has a 3.4EE CPU and 4 gigs of RAM and has a X1950XT working nicely. From what I'm gathering most people having issues had AMD chipsets. About 50% of the people say use the "hotfix" version of the driver and the other 50% say use the regular (non hotfix I guess) version. Some claim that the hot fix is, in fact, a hotfix while other claim that the hotfix drivers are standalone drivers that just include the hotfix. I've downloaded every version I've come across just in case. At this time I guess I'll try the latest Sapphire hotfix driver version (9.6) first. I run imaging software (Acronis True Image) and can revert back to an older configuration if need be. Any help would be appreciated. I'm getting tired and the card hasn't even arrived. I've used the search fuction on this thread (and Google) and still haven't come across any sure fire answers. ATI driver or Sapphire's? Hotfix or not? Latest version or some version that actually works? If you could point me to the "magic" page of this thread or some guide or tutorial I'd appreciate it. I'm fairly experienced with ATI (I've got a working 9800XT) and driver install procedures and issues. I'd like this to go smoothly so I'd love some HD3850 AGP owners advice! Thank you in advance.
 
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