AMD Radeon ZeroCore Tech

[Magic Carpet]

So, how does exactly it work?

With the latest Catalyst Beta my Gigabyte HD 7770 OC is on duty 24/7. I caught it with the fan off once but it crashed upon waking from sleep (Windows 8 x64). Since then, my monitor is always on. And of course, minimizing all windows does jack (sounds ironically with the modern GUI). Bad luck?

Working as designed for somebody?

Otherwise, it's a great little card, performance per $ beats a similarly priced Geforce 600 series card. No issues in games so far. Just this ZeroCore feature, not sure why it's there if it's not working reliably.

 

[chimaxi83]

Works fine on my second card. It completely shuts off. It's a Lightning with LEDs to show active power phases, and goes completely dark. The first card always has at least it's first phase on, as the card doesn't shut completely down. Power measurement at desktop idle and at monitor sleep changes by about 5 watts, but that's margin of error really so I don't know if that's anything ZeroCore.

What are you expecting the card to do?

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

My 6850 does the same actually... I cant let my computer sleep or it will always crash when I come back

My monitor works fine though, I just have to leave SOMETHING running, like a song on pause or whatever, else it always crashes

 

[Termie]

It doesn't work with my HD7870 when the monitor is asleep. But I'm currently testing crossfire and it does shut down the second card at the desktop.

 

[jackstar7]

Also experiencing the crash after sleep (so just shutting down these days rather than leaving something running). But leaving something running should work. Hopefully it's a bug they can sort out in a future driver.

 

[Magic Carpet]

What are you expecting the card to do?

To work as advertised.

Now, as of the 13.4 Catalyst drivers, it still doesn't work. It briefly shuts down the fan but monitor never comes back on, fan running at full speed.

Maybe I should give Gigabyte a ticket.

 

[Silverforce11]

Its still not working with windows monitor off-sleep, the 77xx & 78xx (had it with my 7850) series has issue waking up. Its working fine with 79xx cards though.

If you go into full sleep mode in windows, it wakes up fine.

 

[railven]

Its still not working with windows monitor off-sleep, the 77xx & 78xx (had it with my 7850) series has issue waking up. Its working fine with 79xx cards though.

If you go into full sleep mode in windows, it wakes up fine.

Good to hear this doesn't affect the 79xxs.

My second card (after I stopped mining and turn ULPS back on) goes full dark when I'm surfing the net. I also have no issues letting my PC hibernate and waking up.

Are you guys using HDMI based monitors? I remember reading HDMI connected cards were having issues waking up, some where....

 

[Arkadrel]

If you have 2 radeons, working in some form of crossfire.
Then the pimary card stays on, and downclocked in idle mode.
While your 2nd card turns off (to save power).

To people that put their PCs into sleepmode/standby mode and have issues with crossfire zerocore tech....

Why not just turn pc on when you need it, and off when you dont?
It doesnt take that long to boot up windows these days.

 

[railven]

Why not just turn pc on when you need it, and off when you dont?
It doesnt take that long to boot up windows these days.

Think you're missing the point.

 

[SPBHM]

Why not just turn pc on when you need it, and off when you dont?
It doesnt take that long to boot up windows these days.

sleep mode is much faster and with zerocore you could theoretically save some 15w when using the PC with only the CPU loaded, or downloading files...

 

[Magic Carpet]

Why not just turn pc on when you need it, and off when you dont?
It doesnt take that long to boot up windows these days.

What if I have one card? What If I need to leave the computer on for whatever reason without the need to use video output? IMO, this is a neat feature. Part of the reason I bought this 7770, was of this feature! Too bad, AMD drivers still suck :thumbsdown: (unless of course it's a hardware problem). No review site has ever mentioned about this problem.

2) OOTB, this is a faulty card, unless you manually disable monitor sleep (most Windows installs have it on otherwise). The only way to get back to work would be to restart the computer, losing all your work, potentially inviting a disk scan in the process. Nice solution, isn't it?

Its still not working with windows monitor off-sleep, the 77xx & 78xx (had it with my 7850) series has issue waking up. Its working fine with 79xx cards though.

Nice to know, that only the higher end AMD cards provide the advertised feature set

 

[bononos]

Reviews should have revealed irritating bugs like this instead of being so fixated with performance benchmarking.

 

[Kenmitch]

I have a 7870. If windows tells it to sleep after x amount of time I sometimes have issues. I disabled sleep in windows by selecting never. If I push the sleep button on my keyboard my rig does a total power down sleep. It wakes up fine with a mouse wiggle...Works for me.

Who would I blame? AMD? Microsoft? Intel? User error?

 

[Rvenger]

To work as advertised.

Now, as of the 13.4 Catalyst drivers, it still doesn't work. It briefly shuts down the fan but monitor never comes back on, fan running at full speed.

Maybe I should give Gigabyte a ticket.

Needs a new Bios from the sounds of it.

 

[bononos]

I have a 7870. If windows tells it to sleep after x amount of time I sometimes have issues. I disabled sleep in windows by selecting never. If I push the sleep button on my keyboard my rig does a total power down sleep. It wakes up fine with a mouse wiggle...Works for me.

Who would I blame? AMD? Microsoft? Intel? User error?

I had the same issue (opened a thread in the help forum a while back) and thought it was a mb issue after updating the bios. Could never solve it and had to disable sleep. Manually initiating sleep and waking works ok like you said. I didn't think it was a graphics card issue from the 6xxx series to the 7xxx zerocore.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Sapphire 7790, zerocore working as advertised. Power drops from 50W to 40W when monitor enters sleepstate. Fan doesn't turn off though.

Did have a problem with the monitor not waking up right after driver install. Unplugging and replugging monitor cable did wake it up again. After a reboot it works correctly (and keeps doing so).