Topic: Hey Pug, I just bought a Radeon 4870...

[WindAndConfusion]

You have until Newegg ships it out tomorrow to convince me that nVidia has some better cards at a similar or lower price point.

I suggest you focus on the heat issues, as I've heard some utterly ridiculous things about how hot this card gets:

Cons: Gets relatively loud when hot, and it gets HOT. You could cook an egg on this thing, running at near boiling temps (100C) in my Spedo Advance. And it's non-refundable. How great is that. I'm afraid even if I replace it, it'll have the same issue.


Cons: This thing gets SOOOOO hot, it really does. the fan also gets to loud.
playing MU online this thing peaked at freakin 91c... wth was that all about.

[Xessive]

Wow, that is hot. MU Onlin is not even that graphic intensive!

[WindAndConfusion]

Yeah, but most game engines just run as fast as they can, no matter how undemanding they are. Even Quake 3 can max out a top-of-the-line card, simply by running at 800 frames per second.

Anyway, most people are reporting temperatures in the 60-65 C range, which leads me to believe that those few people who actually did get those ridiculous temperatures just had issues with the fan or heatsink.

$INTERJECTION, I'm probably going to underclock my card, just because I don't want an extra 150 watts on my electric bill and I don't need another space heater.

[Quemaqua]

I've got a 4850 and I think it's effing fantastic.  I heard that it runs hot and has fan problems (fan speeds are too low), but thus far I haven't had any reason to mess with the fan settings.  So it's quiet and runs cool (around 50-55 C) pretty much all the time.  I don't know about any other model, but my experience with this one has been stellar.  Not even any driver problems or game compatibility issues.

[W7RE]

Yea I've been pretty happy with my 4850.

[WindAndConfusion]

I've got a 4850 and I think it's effing fantastic.  I heard that it runs hot and has fan problems (fan speeds are too low), but thus far I haven't had any reason to mess with the fan settings.  So it's quiet and runs cool (around 50-55 C) pretty much all the time. 

I actually find that quite reassuring, since the single-slot 4850 is supposed to have even worse cooling than the double-slot 4870.

[Quemaqua]

Actually, mine's a double-slot.  But I imagine they're pretty comparable, and I know the heat issues on mine can be resolved pretty easily by just adjusting the fan speed (which in my case I haven't needed to do).

[W7RE]

Mine is a single slot. I've had it for a while now and never touched any of the hardware settings, and never had any issues. Though I do have poor insulation here and haven't used the card during the summer yet. So it stays pretty cool where my PC is.

[Pugnate]

It is a great buy at $130.

[WindAndConfusion]

I assume you mean the 4850. Either that, or by "$130," you are in fact referring to some kind of fictional, non-American currency.

[Pugnate]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121288

[WindAndConfusion]

That's actually $165 + shipping + tax, minus a $30 rebate if you can trick the manufacturer into honoring it. That's $156 for me, plus an extra 10-12 to get a shipping option that will arrive this week, and $186 considering that I'd probably never get the rebate anyway.

[scottws]

That's actually $165 + shipping + tax, minus a $30 rebate if you can trick the manufacturer into honoring it. That's $156 for me, plus an extra 10-12 to get a shipping option that will arrive this week, and $186 considering that I'd probably never get the rebate anyway.

I know what you mean.  I bought some OCZ memory once because of a $40 rebate and they tried to not honor it.  They said I had forgotten to include the UPC and that I need to send that in, which of course I could not do because I already fucking sent it in!!!  I wrote all their e-mail addresses I could find saying essentially that it was the first time I had bought an OCZ product and that I had learned my lesson and would never fall for their scams again.  They had the rebate house honor it.

The next thing I bought that had a rebate (also an OCZ product), I took pictures of the process of me completing the rebate steps, including a before/after picture of the UPC cut from the box, placed in a small Ziploc bag, and stapled to the front of the rebate form.  Of course after all the effort they honored that one without me having to raise any sort of ruckus.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, I fell for that one when I got my 4850.  It was one of those things where you had to like... sign up for it and it was really just a huge scam to sell your email address to people or whatever.  I didn't bother trying to redeem it.

[Pugnate]

OK when I had just been a year in Canada, I bought a $350 cellphone with a $250 rebate from AT&T. The man at the booth told me to send a photocopy of the receipt, which I did. Later I got a reply that I needed to send the original copy. When I did, I was told the time had expired. For a poor student working part time at nigh at the university, it was kinda crushing.

[WindAndConfusion]

God damn, this thing is huge. If my knowledge of naval classification is correct, it is a Nimitz-class videocard.

Unfortunately, there was a small oversight on my part, namely, that I don't have any PCIe connectors on my power supply and I neglected to order an adapter. I already installed the card, and I don't want to remove it, since it was such a pain in the ass getting it in.

Does anyone know if I can try booting without the additional power connectors inserted, or is that going to bite me in the ass? This would only be a temporary thing, until stores open tomorrow.

[scottws]

I don't know.  I suppose you can try.  I doubt it would do any harm.  I wouldn't try playing a game though.

[WindAndConfusion]

I actually found a technical paper from a company that makes power management chips for PCIe-based videocards in the 150 watt range (ie, cards exactly like the 4870). The impression I get is that it probably won't work.

Figure 1 is a 150W-ATX graphics power-management solution that uses the MAX5943A and MAX5944 integrated circuits. This solution ensures that power from the two 12V supply connectors are never shorted together. It also allows power from the x16 connector to be routed to the loads that would otherwise be powered from the 150W-ATX 6-pin power connector, in case the 150W-ATX connection is not established. This solution, however, prevents the graphics card from starting when it is not fully plugged into the PCI Express connector, or if the PC motherboard is not powered.

That only applies to the described two-chip power management scheme, however. There's no discussion about how the one- and three-chip schemes behave in this case. Furthermore, I'm not pulling my card out just to disassemble and examine it, and I can't find a sufficiently high-resolution picture of the 4870 on Google Images, so I have no idea what power management scheme the 4870 actually uses.

[WindAndConfusion]

Alright, I'm almost done. The card is ready to go, except for the 70 C idle temperature and the fact that the ATI control panel has locked me out from under/overclocking.

I need to get this card's fever down and I can't seem to underclock it. Does anyone know what I'm not doing? I already tried the trick of creating a profile and then editing it in Notepad.

[scottws]

Is ATiTool still around?

[WindAndConfusion]

It's now called AMD GPU tool. In between my last post and this one, I downloaded and (I thought) installed it, although now I can't seem to find it on my system.

Anyway, I'm in the middle of a ridiculously long reboot. It seems to take Vista a good 5-10 minutes to create a system restore point after a driver update.

[WindAndConfusion]

Oh no, it's not Windows going slowly, it's my six-week-old Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB dying. The one that I bought to replace the Seagate Barracuda 750GB that died after about six months.

Lovely.

[WindAndConfusion]

Alright, drive is backed up and disconnected, AMD GPU tool is installed and working, and I'm still hitting a wall. It turns out the most recent version of the AMD GPU tool can set clock speeds, but not voltages or fan speeds, which are the the two things I really need to get access to. Ignoring that, the tool sucks generally. I need to find yet another method.

This card is putting up one hell of a fight.

[Cobra951]

Oh no, it's not Windows going slowly, it's my six-week-old Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB dying. The one that I bought to replace the Seagate Barracuda 750GB that died after about six months.

Lovely.

Every Seagate drive I have owned is now dead.  That includes one from the same or newer vintage as the 6 drives spinning here right right now.  They're some mix of Maxtor and WD.

[scottws]

I've had good luck with all my Seagate drives.  I consider Western Digital, Seagate/Maxtor, and old Maxtor all on the same plane, with Samsung and Fujitsu a tier below, and IBM/Hitachi occupying the bottom rung with their Death.. I mean Deskstars.

[WindAndConfusion]

I've purchased four desktop Seagate drives in the last three years, plus the one in my laptop. All of the desktop drives have already failed. Only one of them lasted more than six months, but to its credit, that drive survived multiple one-meter drops onto concrete while in an external enclosure. (By the time that drive finally died, the enclosure was more or less disintegrating. Out of all the Seagate drives I've ever singly purchased, that's the only one I wasn't disappointed with.)

I've purchased five Western Digitals over the same time period, and they're all still with us.

[Pugnate]

Every Seagate drive I ever purchased has either failed or developed major noise issues. Every WD drive I have used has been fine.

[Quemaqua]

I will never buy another Seagate drive.  My current one is stable, but I went through 2 prior to this.  Good warranty, but you're almost guaranteed to need it.  I'll be buying Western Digital next time.

[Xessive]

So far my best experiences have been with WD and Maxtor. Fujitsu drives are quite reliable but they don't play well with other brands, at least in my experience with them.

[scottws]

Weird you guys haven't had luck with them.  I've got dual 120 GB Seagate SATA hdds in my server and they have been running since 2005, I believe.  SMART still reports them as fine and everything.

My current desktop has no Seagate.  I think I have a laptop Seagate in my USB/eSATA external enclosure, but I don't recall exactly.

[Quemaqua]

I've heard lots of bad reports about Seagate.  I even mentioned them at the time when I was looking into HDDs for my new system, and I remember several here saying "Oh, what rubbish.  They're fine".  Wrongo.  Just because they used to be good doesn't mean they still are.

[scottws]

I suppose that could be true.  My Seagates are several years old except this laptop one I have, which is very new.

I wish Maxtor was still its own entity.  I loved those old 40 GB Maxtors I used to run in RAID0.  You couldn't hear those things even with your ear up to them.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, I used to have some good Maxtor drives.  WDs, too.

I do hope Seagate gets better.  I wonder what could have so suddenly gone wrong.  They were great for years.  I guess we should just be glad they aren't the only game in town to offer a high quality version of the same product.