Advice for AGP 3850 users to avoid problems

[Deanodarlo]

Introduction

First of all, I love this card. For the first time, AGP users are not paying a huge premium for a cut down card, so I couldn't resist one last purchase for my aging system (2.4Ghz Venice Athlon64). I don't play many PC games since making the transition to the PS3. PC exclusives are now a thing of the past so I've never required the power of dual core solutions for general PC use. I still keep an eye on the market however and fancied COD4 on the PC so I can enjoy the keyboard and mouse. This card runs cool and finally makes shader/HD games smooth, even on a single core processor. Very impressed.

After reading around the net, I noticed some people have problems with these awesome cards regardless of the vendor and I thought I'd share my experiences.

I bought the Club3D/Powercolor version of the card as I like the heatsink design much better - far easier to clean and better quality. I also only had a 6 pin PCI-E connector on my Akasa 460W PSU, while the Sapphire model requires the 8-pin (lucky I noticed this before deciding which to buy!).

On arrival of the box, it appears to be missing a molex->PCI-E adaptor and a composite to composite lead according to the reviews. Very good job my PSU had the 6 pin connector, or I would have been stuck. The box also wasn't sealed and looked like it had been opened previously. Can anyone confirm the extras that came with your cards (sapphire/club3d/powercolor)?

I can't be bothered to send it back for such minor things, but are such practices (open boxes getting sent out as new) common practice among e-tailors? I'd imagine it happens when stuff is sent back immediately as faulty, but then tested as fine so goes back on sale. Shouldn't these be sold as refurbished?

Advice

*The card froze in 3D applications and at first I considered the PSU. However, after reading around the net, many fell into the trap of buying new PSU's only to find it wasn't the problem. Others disable fast writes and reduce the AGP speed from 8x to 4x. For me, that was not the problem. The issue was a simple bios setting - DBI output for AGP transfer. Once I disabled that, everything worked 100%. This setting simply tries to communicate with the AGP card differently to save power and reduce interference, nothing to do with performance, but perhaps it doesn't work right with the bridge chip and my K8T800pro chipset.

*With the default drivers provided (cat 8.4), certain bold links on webpages come up as red when they should be blue. A strange minor problem, but annoying. There is a hotfix available from the AMD/ATI site that should fix the issue according to the net. Perhaps the latest catalysts do, but I haven't tried yet. Apparently ATI/AMD still don't directly support the AGP version of the card so you have to add the device ID manually to the drivers if you want to use newer ones than provided on the packaged CD.

The link to the official hotfix is here:

http://support.ati.com/ics/sup...r.asp?questionID=31625

Ok, I hope this helps some of you.

 

[bodhammer]

Thanks for your post.

I bought the Sapphire version of the card last week. The PowerColor was out of stock. The Sapphire does have an 8-pin connector but the specification does allow a 6-pin to be plugged in, see http://www.playtool.com/pages/...ectors.html#pciexpress.

I was able to plug my 6-pin connector from my Antec Earthwatt EA 500 V1 power supply and the card is running without any issues. I'm at 8X, FastWrites, etc. Basically everything is turned on. I have not had a blue screen or any power issues.

I'm using the Cat 8.7 Hotfix drivers from the Sapphire website. I did try the 8.8 Hotfix drivers from ATI but I saw about a 100 point drop in 3DMark06. I did not install CCC, just the Driver and ATI Tray. I'm not overclocking. My benchmarking is not rigious, just reboot, close some tray stuff and turn off McAffee.

With the Sapphire card I got a CD, S-Video to Component Cable (RGB) , S-Video to Composite (Yellow), DVI->VGA, and 2x4-pin Molex to 8-Pin PCIe power.

I originally thought the card was hotter than my X800, I'm not so sure now. After a few days the fan seem to quiet down and case temps are a little cooler. I did give the case a good dusting. I may add an aftermarket fan but I don't think I need it right away. All my games seem new again and though I know the CPU is the bottleneck, this will tide me over through the XMAS bills. I will build a new uber-system in the spring after the new socket CPU is out. I'm not state of the art but I'm pretty pleased for $115 (AR) for the FPS/$$$ improvement.

My $.02,
Bod

Benchmarks:
X800 Pro
3DMark Score 1594 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 826
CPU Score 726

HD3850
3DMark Score 5173 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 2650
SM 3.0 Score 3308
CPU Score 758
FSX went from ~15 to 18-19 fps telling me I'm still CPU bound on that.
HL2:EP2 benchmarks went from 45 to 60 FPS at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200
Bioshock is a new game with SM3 compared to the SM2 hack I was using!

Current System is:
Socket 478 P4 EE (Gallatin) at 3.5Ghz (Epox EP-4PCA3+ Intel i875P)
2GB DDR Ram at 2-4-4-7 206Mhz
2-500 GB Seagate Sata in Raid 1
Earthwatts EA500 V1 PS
Antec P160 Case

 

[bodhammer]

P.s. benchmarks are shown with 8.7 from the Sapphire site. They also told me they saw issues with 8.8 but were not specific.

 

[evolucion8]

Nice score, and yes you are severely CPU limited, I still having that CPU somewhere in my closet, great chip for media encoding and multi tasking, sometimes I get so tempted to put it back... the official drivers won't install on the HD 3850 AGP version. I managed to use a different BIOS for my card and edited it to match my Cooler RPM, GPU Core Speed and RAM speed of the stock BIOS, (I used the ATi HD 3850 AGP reference BIOS) and now works fine with the official drivers. I has the BIOS fix for Sapphire and HIS IceQ3 versions. My card is now called the HD 3800 series and has the 1002-9505 VendorID/DeviceID. If you don't have problems with your drivers and they work like you want it it's fine, but if you want to use the Official Drivers along with CCC, I can mod a BIOS for your card. Of course the Overdrive feature will not work but since the card is running at it's intented frequency, ATi Tool or ATi Tray Tool can be used for more overclocking, or use Rivatuner for monitoring; this is my current score;

3DMark Score 7464 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 3907
SM 3.0 Score 4365
CPU Score 1159

Since you have a better chipset than mine, you can lower your RAM latency a bit to improve the performance and/or activate the PAT, Pentium 4 loves bandwidth.

 

[Deanodarlo]

Thanks for the info on the PCI-E 8-pin connector. I didn't realize you could just plug a 6-pin into it!

One thing that's stupid about the 8-pin is it looks VERY similar to the 8-pin EPS/CPU connector. I have an EPS connector on my PSU, but realized it was for motherboards not graphics cards. Some people will think it's an 8-pin PCI-E connector and shove it in (which apparently is possible if you shove hard enough), thus killing their card. Who thinks up these things? Connectors seem to getting worse!

I just installed the AGP hotfix drivers and they fixed the red/blue link issue in browsers. This is the first time I've used the .net CCC and I must say it's really slowed down my boot time and seems to eat a lot of resources. I might use the ATI tray as well and try to avoid CCC.

I've edited the bios of nearly all my previous cards (clocks, ids etc), but I think I'll leave this one as it is for now. I don't mind adding the device ID to the drivers or using the hotfix pack, but thanks for the advice.

The fan on this Club3D/Powercolor card is exceptionally quiet. It has the golden coloured heatpipe design and at idle the GPU is at 40C 300Mhz, then stays under 60C when ramped up to full speed and load. I have some Vantech stealth fans in my system that are thermally controlled by the motherboard, so I'd know if it was noisy, but it really is whisper quiet even when playing games. Very impressed. I'm in the UK and these cards also seem very rare so I'm not surprised you couldn't find one - I bought one of the last three that seem to be available online in the whole country! Just checked now and there are no where to be found. Probably explains why it appeared to have been opened - probably sent back stock that tested as working. The Sapphire ones are everywhere - perhaps retailers get a better profit on them, or Club3D/Powercolor has stopped making these cards which would be a shame. They appear to be selling very well.

 

[Deanodarlo]

Just an update.

I was still suffering random lockups, so experimentation continued.

I re-enabled DBI output (which initally made things worse as before) and instead increased the AGP voltage from 1.5v to 1.6v. Then all my issues went away (hopefully).

Is this a sign of a weak PSU, poor motherboard voltage regulation at the AGP slot, poor AGP signalling or a slightly out of spec card requiring a bit more power at the AGP slot. This is the first time I've had a card with the rialto bridge chip, so perhaps it needs more power when transferring all that data from the 3850. Who knows, it could be anything!

What I do know is this is definitely my last AGP card. The writing is on the wall with all these issues - it seems the high power cards are just too much for our old boards at times!

Intel boards seem to be having the least issues, but they designed the AGP spec so that's probably why most of these cards work fine on them. The back engineered chipsets (like nforce, via) are a little flaky at high power and bandwidth usage required by these monster cards.

Anyway, I've just been playing Stalker at max details! This game is awesome and a PC exclusive, so I'm still getting use of out this thing. Just hope 1.6v doesn't fry it!

 

[will889]

1.6v isn't going to fry anything. Many of us back in the AGP days used 1.6 as default voltage since increased voltage was needed on many an AGP motherboard for the video cards to work properly.

 

[evolucion8]

Usually hard locks are not related to the lack of power of the AGP, the HD 3850 sucks less power than the X1950XT/PRO that came to AGP. The Rialto Bridge simply translates the PCI-E calls to AGP commands, that's it, and the high end videocards released after 2002 far exceeded the power supplying capability of the AGP, hence the auxiliar Molex, Floppy, PCI-E or 8 pin PCI-E power connector.

The issue is non existant on Intel chipset (865PE/875P), only on nForce and Via chipsets had strange issues. My GF had issues with her X1950GT and her Via P4M880PRO series chipset. I just disabled Fast Writes and AGP 3.0 calibration, increased the AGP Voltage to 1.6 and made sure that the RAM timings were stable, and that the Power Supply was strong enough to avoid issues. And everything works fine, strangely enough she had more hard lock issues with her old X800XT PE than with this card which didn't had any. I even turned Fast Writes on and didn't had a single lock,

I also used the DisableProgPCILatency in the registry to avoid the card manipulate the BUS too long, so now the latency is at 64 which is shared across all devices, instead of 255 for the videocard alone. The performance is the same, but is more smooth and there's no sound stuttering like before.

 

[Deanodarlo]

You're spot on evolucion, there is definitely issues as you described. I have the K8T800pro chipset, and a quick read around the net and guru3d shows many have the same issues, even after upgrading PSUs.

I spoke too soon about my own stability; even at the higher voltage, it still eventually locks up in a 3D game. I guess the card or motherboard needs a bios update, as I'm sure it's not a power issue and the card itself will work well in an intel system.

At the moment I've resorted to setting all AGP options to disabled (lower read/write WS, DBI output, Fastwrites, 3.0 Calibration) and reduced the speed to 4x. In other words I've slowed down the AGP communication as much as possible!

So far, I've been playing for hours trouble free. 4x seems to make no difference to its 3Dmarks or performance. If anything, it lags less probably because the connection is more stable. With 512MB ram on the card, the 4x communication probably isn't affecting things too badly.

 

[evolucion8]

With such large frame buffer, little or no swap will occur to the system RAM, that rarely happens since most developers try to fit their data in the VRAM and avoid any AGP Texturing as much as possible (Unless you crank your FSAA a lot, but is not of a big issue since it's resolved on shaders and the memory footprint is smaller, that's why in ultra high resolutions with 8x FSAA, nVidia cards has a more sharper drop in performance like 8800GT, which the ATi card match or outperforms by a nice margin, still both are totally unplayable hehe), but with latency like molasses, AGP Texturing is unimportant.

 

[Deanodarlo]

Anther update! I've spent far too much time on this; thank goodness for console gaming, PC gaming is getting terrible to trouble shoot!

I read loads of people have issues with this Powercolor/Club3D card and nforce/VIA chipsets, but I was determined to sort it out!

I had some more crashes in Stalker, always after a certain period of time in game, and again I thought it was the card. Due to the time delay, I thought perhaps it's heat related. The Rialto bridge chip gets searing hot (85C+ apparently) so I placed a small heatsink on it. Much better, but no difference in Stalker. Hard freeze and requires a system reset.

I then thought since most the time it crashed when going to the menu screen or loading a saved game, it may be the powerplay feature (which changes the clock speed from 2D->low 3D->full 3D) causing instability. With this in mind, I edited the Bios so it wouldn't change speeds and flashed the card. Still freezes in Stalker, so flashed back to the default bios with powerplay enabled.

I then put everything back to normal (AGP 8x, Fastwrites on, AGP 3.0 calibration) but left DBI output off, as that definitely crashes the card when switching from 2D to 3D everytime (I think this could be to do with the frequency change of 2D->3D but haven't tested, or a chipset incompatibility - the bios default for this setting is "disabled").

So, is it the famous suggestion - the PSU? The Akasa supply I have is a quality product, not cheap crap, and I'd read others on the net running dual core processors and even more power hungry setups with this PSU. Still, I had to test.

I hammered the system to max load to test the PSU. Ran prime95 to max the CPU, ATItool 3D test to max the GPU, started perfect disk background defragging one of my hard drives and surfed the net using the second hard drive, and to top it off I set the DVDROM drive into action playing some tunes. My poor single core system was really getting it, but it was 100% stable for an hour before I decided to stop before my electricity bill got adversly affected! PSU must be fine. In the past, when it's been PSU related, this test always hard reset the PC.

Finally I decided to install some older games like UT2004, Quake4 etc and they ran fine without a single crash. Shame I don't have COD4 and oblivion to test at the moment too.

After doing a search on Stalker on the net, I found that it's memory management can be a little suspect as it uses huge amounts of swap and MANY people were suffering from hard freezes, some with low power cards.

I tried playing the game without loading save games, without entering the 2D menu, and it didn't crash at all. It seems as though the crashes were related to the game and current ATI drivers (8.8 hotfix for AGP). What a waste of trouble shooting time. At least my card has a nice Rialto heatsink now!