Finally have the 5870, but now i have random screen artifacts

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purplefire

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So my pre-ordered and delayed Sapphire HD5870 Vapor x card finally came today, and i've been playing with it since. I have however encountered a worrying problem where my screen randomly glitches in various different ways. It doesn't matter where i am; in-game, on the desktop, waiting for a match to load on some other game. I get random rectangles skewing around the screen, black bars tearing accross horizontally, the screen sometimes flickers black briefly. Sometimes on the desktop i'll see colour in the tears that looks like a television signal being interrupted for a split second. I assumed it could be because i had the boxed drivers installed, so i installed them and restarted. (Bear in mind i have this vista bug where it takes 20 minutes to boot past the windows loading screen every time i restart, so i am trying to avoid doing anything that requires a reboot. So anyway i installed these new drivers and rebooted, but i still appear to be having them. These are the 10.9 drivers i think, or something like that.

Anyone heard anything about the 5870 being a bit dodge for no reason? It seems to play games alright. I'm not really getting the performance increase i was really expecting in ArmA2, but that is a bit inefficient an engine to really blame the card i guess.

I have a 600w power supply, a quadcore Q6600 processor at 2.40Ghz, four gigs of quad channel RAM. My resolution is my monitor's native, at 1680*1055.

Both PCI power supplies are plugged into the card.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. Vista is up to date.

Thanks in advance for any help
 
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purplefire

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Have the latest drivers already i think. I'd really like to be patient and try all other alternatives than to RMA it just yet, it is also barely available.

Damn, and it has that horrid coil whine that people are talking about, realy loud. I can't see that being fixable in a driver update. So far i can't say i'm as thrilled as i would have liked to have been with this card :/
 
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purplefire

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I'm really concerned. I'm playing OF2 Dragon Rising and i have the graphics all on full, AA at 4X, the game is running nice and smooth, more or less. I can tell it's struggling slightly, my eyes can detect variances in fire rates and things due to a slight slowdown. After a few minutes of this chugging, i can suddenly smell this strong electrical scent. I always associate this smell with electricity, since i used to play with Scalectrics when i was a kid, and the exposed rails on the track would emit this strong electrical smell that is hot to the sense. This smell is being pumped out of the PSU exhaust port, and i leaned in for a smell too. Bear in mind that this isn't an enclosed PSU, it has an intake on the opposite side inside the PSU box, so is it possible the new chemicals of the 5870 are just heating up and cooked off?, along with the vapor-x tech stuff? Is that what i can smell?
 
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purplefire

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As stated in my first post, the PSU is 600W. If you'd like to know what make/model, i'm afraid i'm not sure, it has no markings of any kind suggestive of that, and i can't remember where i bought it. Temperature of the GPU doesn't seem to go higher than 60
 
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purplefire

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How do you mean it's not listed? It is transparent and blue all over and illuminates blue, which is also UV reactive. That's probably why there are no stickers on it.

The 5870 apparently uses quite low quantities of power.
 
JAYDEEJOHN

JAYDEEJOHN

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noob2222

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sounds like the psu is taking a dump with the new card. Not every PSU is designed the same, 600 w is total power, and cheap brands can put most of that into the 5v rail instead of the 12v. I learned that quite a while back when i bought a cheap 450, had to upgrade it pretty quick since it had very little supply on the 12v.

If you post the brand and model, info can be looked up, if not, what you need to list are the specs, would look like this

3.3v .... 38A
5v+ ..... 44A
5v- ...... 10A
12v+..... 20A

And yes this is the specs on the POS power supply, 20A on the 12v rail won't handle much, 44A on 5v is overkill.

I would recommend something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153036
 
JAYDEEJOHN

JAYDEEJOHN

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(Bear in mind i have this vista bug where it takes 20 minutes to boot past the windows loading screen every time i restart, so i am trying to avoid doing anything that requires a reboot

^^ This could be attributed to a bad psu
 
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purplefire

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Nah, this happened after some windows updating i think. I used to be able to restart a couple of times and could skip the 20 minute thing, but now it's unskippable. This was happening before i got the card btw. It hangs on crcdisk.sys. Incidentally, i have a saitek cyborg, i used to have an eclipse 2, the lights on it would always go off for a few seconds during the boot sequence, after they came back on the system woujld continue to load, now the lights go off for the entire 20 minutes, and once they come back, it boots. I have tried unplugging the keyboard to no avail, so that seems like a bit of a more specific problem.

Thanks for the advice guys, i guess i'll have to bite my tongue and fork out some more then. What's a good level of power by the way? 1000W seems a bit too much, how about 850?
 
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