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Why does my 4850 suck worse than my 8800??

Forum Graphic & Displays : Graphics Cards - Why does my 4850 suck worse than my 8800??

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I'll start by saying thanks to everyone giving feedback. THW forums are the best and I try to contribute whenever my knowledge lets me. :bounce:

So I upgraded to a 4850 because of all of the positive reviews. I've had nothing but issues with mine.

First: With dual monitors my second monitor now flickers all the time. Monitor is fine (switched cards and flicker is gone) and I've traced it back to my 4850 in that when my gpu goes from 500mhz idle to 625 (even when oc'd to 700) the screen tears and flickers. This is extremely annoying when trying to read text. This happens about once every 30 seconds as windows occasionally needs some gpu to render Aero and thus my gpu goes from its idle state to a working state. I have searched the forums and have found other people experiencing the same. If anyone knows of a fix for this I would greatly appreciate any help.

Second: and this one I hope you guys can help me with. When using ccc to overclcock my card to 700/1095 I can only run ccc 8.6 drivers. CCC drivers 8.7, 8.8, 8.9 all result in windows properly starting up and then soon monitors only displaying black and white vertically lines down the screen. My presumption is that again when the gpu goes from its 500mhz idle state to a working state the card freezes?! But I don't know.

The card is on water and all of the ram have their own copper heat sink. All of the vrms have their own heat sinks as well. My gpu using ccc 8.6 never gets about 50c after playing any game for a few hours. So again, the issue is that I can only oc with ccc using 8.6 drivers. All other drivers freeze system requiring a hard boot.

I've tried rivatuner and atitool, but neither seem to work well with vista 64--at least they didn't for me.

Also, a lot of my games aren't getting better fps than what I got with my 8800gt and some lag more on occasion: cod4, crysis, fallout, mercenaries, kayne and lynch, the club, ect.. I'm guessing its because 8.6 doesn't properly recognize all the features of the 4000 series, but I'm not sure.

Here are my specs:

x3210 oc'd to 3ghz on water (375fsb)
abit ip35-e (bios updated)
4gb Patriot Ram 4-4-4-12, 750mhz (pc6400 but under clocked cuz of oc)
vista ultimate 64 bit
barracuda 320gb
hd4850 oc'd to 700/1095 on separate water system (ccc 8.6 drivers)

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Poor fps, 2d to 3d errors. Drivers? Id elimanate all your drivers , download the 8.9, and run them. Im guessing either the patches, no patches or whatever is hindering you. Start from scratch, using 8.9. If they dont work, the 8.8s are said to be the most stable/trouble free. In almost every circumstance Ive seen its bad driver installation. Something is interferring qwith your installation. Not sure what it is. Some have reinstalled Vista and "wow" it worked. These have been fickle drivers, and Vista/DX10 has been a pain, so, theres several paths that cause these problems, instead of just the drivers themselves. Start from scratch, then go from there

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

Nice opinion there, now go read some benchmarks

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

ryanthesav wrote :

The prob is ati sucks ass...id rather buy boxes full of dog s*** then buy from them.

Butthurt Nvidia fanboy detected

Reply to turboflame

Ya I'd say drivers to.. Did you make sure to remove the nvidia and old ati drivers when you installed the ones.

And ryan I could say the same thing about nvidia, considering both cards I've ever owned from nvidia sucked and one fried *bro also had the same card and it fried just like I told him it would right after warranty*.. But I know better both make some good cards both make some bad cards *although that actually has more to do with the actual manufacter*.

Message edited by noobe1981 on 09-20-2008 at 12:15:25 PM

Reply to noobe1981

Personally I would format and reinstall vista with 8.9 ccc straight off. Especially when you have switched between a nvidia card to an ati card there can be all kinds of conficts.

The other thing is that if it doesn't work after a fresh install it generally means that it is a hardware issue not software.

Reply to gpippas

have you set the speed for pci-e in the bios? if not do so. leaving on auto can cause serios damage. the proper pci-e bus is 100, you can also try a little higher since your overclocking.(thats pci-e 1.0) but i run a 9800gtx at 103 and it works perfect) depending on the hardware it may default to pci-e 1.0 so just know} but be carefull on the bus. 110 and beyond could really mess things up. stay below 105 and alot lower if your unsure.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by winterlord on 09-20-2008 at 02:25:08 PM

Reply to winterlord

winterlord wrote :

have you set the speed for pci-e in the bios? if not do so. leaving on auto can cause serios damage.

boomhowar, did you use Driver Cleaner Pro? I didn't see it mentioned in the thread. Be sure to follow the instructions to the letter. You should clean both the Nvidia drivers and the ATI drivers.

After that test it at stock speeds to rule out the OC, as Sheila said.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by Zorg on 09-20-2008 at 02:52:03 PM

Reply to Zorg

Go into the CCC and play with the settings. Something is holding you back. After that I'd do what the posters above recommend. Delete ALL video drivers and start with a fresh install. By the way, use the 8.8 drivers. The 8.9's retard some games. If I come across the review on that again I'll post it here.

Reply to swifty_morgan

Zorg wrote :

Leaving it on auto will cause instability but I don't believe the new cards are clocked off the PCIe frequency so no damage. It's easy to check with Riva or ATITool. At any rate, your right it should stay at ~100.

boomhowar, did you use Driver Cleaner Pro? I didn't see it mentioned in the thread. Be sure to follow the instructions to the letter. You should clean both the Nvidia drivers and the ATI drivers.

After that test it at stock speeds to rule out the OC, as Sheila said.

That's too old, and will leave out some entries in new drivers that are unlisted. Use driversweeper instead.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1655

------------------------------ Q6600@3.6ghz, GA-EX38-DS4 motherboard, 8gb 800mhz ddr2 4-3-3-12, 8800GTS(g92)@780mhz, 1TB + 1.5TB hdds, 850watt psu
Reply to dagger

I'll keep that in mind. It worked for me recently, but it is a little long in the tooth.

Reply to Zorg

Why would you upgrade from a 8800GT to a 4850?

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by Heyyou27 on 09-20-2008 at 03:49:44 PM

Reply to Heyyou27

ryanthesav wrote :

The prob is ati sucks ass...id rather buy boxes full of dog s*** then buy from them.

crappy comment

Reply to juvealert

Heyyou27 wrote :

Why would you upgrade from a 8800GT to a 4850?

Exactly, the gap is too small to justify the cost, or possible complications that comes naturally with messing with a perfectly good system.

------------------------------ Q6600@3.6ghz, GA-EX38-DS4 motherboard, 8gb 800mhz ddr2 4-3-3-12, 8800GTS(g92)@780mhz, 1TB + 1.5TB hdds, 850watt psu
Reply to dagger

ryanthesav wrote :

The prob is ati sucks ass...id rather buy boxes full of dog s*** then buy from them.

Yeah me 2. Nvidia FTMFWYMFWOOOOOOOO

Reply to SpinachEater

"check the bios of your motherboard". i have an asus, and when ya overclock the motherboard. if the pci-e bus is set on auto you will be seriosly overclocking your bus depending on how high the fsb is set

Reply to winterlord

Thanks to all who have posted so far. Tonight I will try completely removing all of my ati drivers.

My 8800gt was with my xp install and I installed vista with my 4850 so the 4850 is the only card vista has ever seen.

Also, I will check my bios to see if the pci bus is higher than 100. I have been using this board for over a year and have gone through 3 vid cards all of which were oc'd and never had a prob. But this is my first experience with vista and oc-doesn't seem like an os could mess with the bios but not sure.

My 8800gt was 256mb that was given to me, but I soon realized that 512 was needed so I went with the 4850 because of the good reviews and because I needed to upgrade anyway.

Reply to boomhowar

Youve made a good choice, and after you fix your problem , youll enjoy the difference, and the 4850 is alot better than a gt, especially a 256, which doesnt cut it at all knowadays. Heres a good article on vram useage http://www.yougamers.com/articles/ [...] eed-page3/ Gives the basics in laymans terms of what/how and when vram is used

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

Ok its fixed. Here is what I did.

I doubled checked all of my bios and oc'ing I did even though I didn't think it was the problem because I had two previously oc'ed cards.

-pci bus checked out fine, set to 100mhz, not set to auto.
-tried pci bus set to 103mhz. Computer booted fine, same issue.

-deleted all of my older drivers using driversweeper as dagger rec.
-reinstalled all of my drivers. computer booted fine, same issue.

From here I then guessed that it must be a driver issue with vista 64. All hardware is fine and after removing all of the older drivers and reinstalling I was still having the same problem.

I then reinstalled the newest atitool and rivatuner (newest bata version) both to no avail as they could not recognize my card in vista 64 even though they both are supposed to be able to support 4000 series ati with vista 64.

-Even with the latest rivatuner vista claimed that its drivers were not digitally signed even though this release claimed that they were...

FINALLY, here is how I was able to get it to work.

-I found a thread with a link to rivatuner x64 signed drivers. The file name is RivaTuner203drv.rtu, I replaced this with the rivatuner211drv.rtu in the folder where the rivatuner installer was present and reinstalled rivatuner.

Here is the link to the rivatuner file: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloa [...] ivers.html

-Now I am able to OC with ccc 8.8, my speeds are 743/1100.

The culprit: Overclocking under CCC with ATI Overdrive is completely unstable with my vista 64 ultimate machine when using ccc drivers 8.7, 8.8, and 8.9 --Has anyone successfully oc'd their 4000 ati card under vista 64 with CCC???

Thanks to everyone who helped and hopefully this thread can same other people time in the futurel.

Reply to boomhowar

Another not to above. I tried multiple ways to disable the need for vista to check for digitally signed drivers, but vista did anyway. Ran commands via cmd, changed policies, ran as administer and still vista refused to look the other way.

Reply to boomhowar

ryanthesav wrote :

The prob is ati sucks ass...id rather buy boxes full of dog s*** then buy from them.

Your Opinion is new, refreshing and useful.

------------------------------ Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read - Frank Zappa
Reply to radnor

Umm hold on

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

haha, im just kidding, im sorry. I just thought i would say that since the op was asking....please strike my comment from the official record.

Message edited by ryanthesav on 09-24-2008 at 06:47:10 PM

Try this, some have used it and they like it http://citadel.x10hosting.com/readydriverplus/

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

jaydeejohn thanks for all the links.

Reply to boomhowar

YVW

------------------------------ I went drifting, thru the capitols of tin, where men cant walk and cant freely talk, and sons turn their fathers in
Reply to jaydeejohn

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