Help me troubleshoot 5970 issues please.

Jamrock

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Hi,

I have been having some odd issues with my 5970 lately. The other day, when un-installing the 10.5 catalyst drivers a whole bunch of red/grey lines showed up on the screen during un-install and I had to do a hard-reboot. The card is extremely sensitive to OC's and even just upping the clocks from 725/1000 to 800/1150 even with voltage changes will send the card to display grey lines all over my screen. Sometimes the OC will work great at say... 850/1200 and other times as soon as I change the OC or shortly thereafter it will show grey lines and I will have to hard-reboot. I had a "Stable" overclock for quite some time at 810/1150 and I had played games just fine for many, many days and also ran Furmark for ~15 minutes with no issues. Tried the same overclock again just the other day and the grey lines showed up.

Is my card failing perhaps? How can I test this?

I was unable to control fan speed when I got the card (Asus 5970HD) so I used Afterburner to control fan speeds. Recently, the shader clocks as well as the fan speed have greyed out and I can no longer adjust them. I know shader clocks move up with core/mem but the fact that the bar was green for both shader clocks and fan speed for months and now has suddenly greyed out is a bit worrisome.

Is there a good way to test to see if the card is failing or not? I am on the verge of RMA'ing because it just does not feel like it is performing to its full potential at the moment.

Thanks
-J
 
I've heard that 5970s aren't that good at OCing... however...

First off, 5970s are basically in crossfire. The problem is, trying to change clocks on both chips at once almost never works. I have CF 5850s and I HAVE to change their clocks one card at a time. Trying to do both (via Afterburner's setting) will almost always result in a crash or lock up. I don't know how 5970s show up in Afterburner but if it shows up as 2 cards, try doing one at a time. If not, you'll have to try and see what others are doing to OC their 5970s but I'm guessing Afterburner isn't the right app for it. I had a good OC on my CF 5850s but I tried the "OC at startup" option which resulted in BSOD everytime windows loaded until I booted in safe mode and deleted afterburner, then booted normal and reinstalled and never tried that again haha.

Fan speeds are a different matter, the default settings are pretty lousy and Afterburner is great for fan control.

The other thing is, these ATI cards don't have shader control. That's Nvidia territory. Only having core and mem adjustments is normal.

One option for you is to flash a BIOS with higher CCC limits. That is, if ATI Overdrive works fine for you. That way you can raise the CCC limits to whatever you want - lets say 1000/1300 - and use that for OCing.
 

envolva

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Leave the memory clock alone, from my experience an ATI 5870 at 1100MHz memory or 1300MHz memory show an increase of no fps, and +200 graphic card points on Vantage while causing vertical stripes.

Just increase the GPU clock settings to 800-850MHz. You will see a noticeable increase in fps and stable.
 


Not quite true. I assume you mean in FurMark tests? I ran a whole bunch of tests and the results were very clear. At 0xAA the FPS gain was only acheived through core speed. However at 4xAA, additional core speed didn't affect the FPS one bit, while memory saw large gains. Once the memory speed was maxed out, adding core speed didn't affect the average FPS but generally brought the min value up 1-2 FPS.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/259144-29-antialiasing-core-doesn-matter-memory-baby
 

Jamrock

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I know exactly what i'm doing... that is why I have posted here with what I deem to be a very minor overclock as I have stated, which should easily be doable by a 5970. FYI, Metro 2033 is extremely demanding even for a 5970 and I gained a good 10FPS increasing to 5870 speeds... I also play Age of Conan occasionally and can only use one GPU, so I bump GPU1 up a bit for that as well. Furthermore, overclocking a 5970 does NOT void your warranty.. 5970's were designed for OC'ing in mind, why do you think they did not call it 5870x2 which is exactly what it is. They had to keep the power usage under 300W, overclocking to speeds that the card is basically made to run at and i don't recall anyone crying. Get your facts straight, or don't post at all.

Anyways, thanks for the constructive comments everyone else. For most other games your right however, the 5970 breezes through them.

Wolf, Afterburner shows the 5970 as one card.. a "5900 series" unless I am missing some setting somewhere. The reason I suspected the card in the first place is because of some BSOD's I have been getting on shutdown and the rig just seems generally a bit unstable. Could be due to my CPU overclock or something entirely different so I was hoping for some useful comments. Thanks Wolf.

Anyone else with a 5970 have issues with overclocks or similar symptoms?
 

Jamrock

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I don't use CCC. I use ATI Tray Tools/Afterburner for my needs, I dislike CCC and I don't see any reason to use it over Afterburner.

Specs:
i7-920 @ 4.0 ghz
ATI 5970HD
3 x 2GB OCZ DDR3 RAM running @ 1600mhz (advertised running speed)
Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo
Auzentech Prelude X-fi 7.1 sound card
2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB HDD's
1x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB HDD
Antec 1200 Tower Case
Win7 x64
 

Jamrock

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I reset my overclock back to default and I still got a BSOD on shutdown.. so that is not the issue I don't think. I have run memtest86+ before overnight and no errors were reported as well as Prime95.

Strange this is that the 5970 does fine Furmark... so i'm a bit confused.
 

Jamrock

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I will run 3dmark vantage tomorrow and get back to you but I have a couple strange issues to report.

1. I have my i7-920 overclocked to 3.7ghz at the moment.. strange thing is that RealTemp shows the clocks fluctuating! It will show clocks at going from 3400mhz, to 3200mhz, down to 2800mhz... keeps fluctuating up and down. What the hell??

2. My GPU is doing the same thing! Sometimes the 2nd GPU on my 5970 will be at 725/1000 mhz in idle (which is the speeds it goes to during gaming/heavy load.) Only the 2nd GPU.. I thought it was some bug in Afterburner but GPU-Z just showed it as well.. after clicking on and off the page it showed it back at idle speeds but.. kind of worriesome.

3. My Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo seems to be running a little hotter than usual. Could these wild fluctuations be due to a motherboard issue?
 

Jamrock

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Scratch #1.. I must have forgot to turn off SpeedStep the speeds stayed solid at 3.7hz once I started Prime95.

GPU however, as I typed this the 2nd GPU has spiked back up to 725/1000 clocks again... I thought it was a conflict with GPU-Z and Afterburner but it is showing again with just Afterburner up. I am confused... when I switched the sensor window on GPU-Z from GPU1 to GPU2 the clocks "Reset" back to 157/300.. but now they are back again.. and as soon as I open GPU-Z it shows the clocks back at 157/300..

EDIT: After 30s to 1 minute the clocks on GPU2 to go back to 725/1000 in idle each and every time. Going to see what it is like tomorrow after a restart... it still doesn't make sense to me how switching the GPU-Z windows resets the clocks back down to 157/300.. but everytime it will go back to 725/1000 until I switch the GPU-Z windows.. the clock speeds are reported this way in Afterburner and GPU-Z and only for GPU2 so I doubt it is a misreading.
 
Overclocking your cards will mess up their idles if you're running afterburner. For best results you have 2 options. First is to have 2 profiles - default and overclock. Only load the OC profile before playing a game. The 2nd option is to BIOS flash your cards, which will make them behave normally but with whatever OC you set in the BIOS.
 

hooray4boobies

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lol so much effort for 5-10 frames...as long as your minimum is over 60...who cares? i have a 5970 and have no desire to overclock, as everygame runs at max anyway. You run furmark, get your extra 500points out of your overclock...then what? Go and brag to all your forum buddies about your 3-4% gain?

'Back in the day' where overclocking graphic cards to run games better was necessary...sure i can see the point in that...but the latest generation power card smashing basically any game you throw at it? There is seriously no point.
 

Jamrock

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This post is not about overclocking and if you had read the post I overclocked minorly for a few games.. it gets pretty annoying when people come on here asking why I had to overclock... the card hasn't been overclocked in a long time, and yes, your right! The 5970 is very powerful and the overclock is not required for (nearly) any games! I do not run benchmarks, I play games.

Still same thing today, 2nd GPU is at 725/1000 in idle. I don't care about overclocking at the moment or making a profile for overclocking.. I just want to find out why in the world the 2nd GPU is staying in 725/1000 in idle. I'm really close to RMA'ing the card... but, if anyone knows what could be going on please let me know.

 

rofl_my_waffle

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If you have a small monitor the 5970 can easily take any game over 60 FPS.

If you have something like 2560x1600, good luck running any game at 60 minimum at max settings without a overclock. A 2560x1600 screen isn't uncommon among people who are spending $700 on a GPU.

You can make a profile under CCC to adjust idle and load clocks manually though I don't think that is your problem. Many people have issues with idle clocks being way too low at 157mhz core, thats why ATI made 10.5 force higher idle clocks to prevent crashes. I can't imagine why running 750mhz on idle would cause a crash.

Have you tried over volting your card without upping the clocks? Maybe the chips aren't as good since the 5970s cypress cores uses lower standard voltage than the 5870 and 5850.
 

Jamrock

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Well, I guess this has turned more into a topic of what is wrong with my computer. I thought it was many things, and based on the scores the 5970 is getting in 3DMark Vantage and how well it typically performs I am not as worried about it as I thought I was. It doesn't seem to overclock too great at the moment, but an RMA can wait if it is necessary.

My 3DMark Vantage scores for my CPU is a whole nother story however...

Here are my results:



The CPU scores should be in the range of my GPU at least, people are getting in the 30,000 range with my setup at the very least... i7-920 speeds were clocked at 3.8ghz for this test, with hyper-threading disabled, speedstep disabled, intel virtualization etc.

Specs:
i7-920 @ 4.0 ghz
ATI 5970HD
3 x 2GB OCZ DDR3 RAM running @ 1600mhz (advertised running speed)
Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo
Auzentech Prelude X-fi 7.1 sound card
2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB HDD's
1x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB HDD
Antec 1200 Tower Case
Win7 x64