ATi 4870 1GB stability problems

[LN2009]

Lo peeps,

Just built a new system:

Sapphire PE-AM2RS740G Mobo
AMD 7750 (2.7)
Gainward Golden Sample 4870 1GB
Kingston CL8500 (5-5-5-15) (4GB)
Antec HE Neopower 550W PSU
Samsung Spinpoint F1 (640GB)
Vista Ultimate 64 (SP1)

Problems I am having is due mainly to stability, playing WoW tends to cause the system to freeze, Vista sometimes recovers by restarting.

Vista says the ATi display driver is the problem, causing a BSOD.

I tried 9.3 this resulted in a crash, usually within 10-15 minutes. With the 9.2's I got around an hour out of it before the crash.

Is there a problem I am missing or are these drivers known to cause problems? I've downloaded the 8.12 and 9.1 drivers to try. It is a royal pain in the ass because of the board using an Ati/AMD chipset. 9.3 were the only driver package to include the HDMI sound driver.

Other problem I am having is with USB ports, I'm not getting enough power to run the WD passport HDD unless I unplug something, like the USB Wifi dongle.

I do have this arriving possibly tomorrow, ASROCK A790GXH/128M, because the sapphire board although it's a 740G isn't a 7-Series chipset, so no AMD OD, board also doesn't have CPU voltage modifier, despite having a load of other OC functions.

Hope you can help.

 

[thilanliyan]

Are your video card temps okay? Use Rivatuner to check the temps while gaming.

Could be a power issue as well form what you describe. Do you have another PSU that you can test with?

 

[LN2009]

Hey thanks for the reply.

I just did a little testing of it and I can get the system to crash outside of WoW. I ran Sandra and then ran the overdrive auto tune. Probably not the best of ideas but it did get me 99% activity/usage on the card.

At peak load, running the Sandra GPU test, overdrive, and WoW in a window on full settings (3 fps ) temperature peaked at 62 C.

Running just WoW in a window the temperature didn't go over 43 C, I even turned the fan down to 30% on the card and still it didn't rise.

Switching to turbo mode (different bios on the card set to 775Mhz) doesn't seem to make a difference either.

One thing I have noticied is that being a mATX board everything is quite close together. The Northbridge and southbridge are passively cooled with the North almost touching the 4870 and the South passive cooler is underneath totally covered by the 4870 heatsink.

Makes me wonder if the heatsink of the 4870 is dumping all the excess heat right into the south and northbridge causing them to overheat.

The Asrock board arrives tomorrow so will try, try again. Guess it's either the Xbox360 or NCIS tonight!

 

[thilanliyan]

Well it doesn't seem to be temp related for your vid card. You could try hooking up a spare fan or something else to blow right onto the motherboard chipsets to see if that's what's causing the problem.

If it takes a while for the system to crash, it sounds like it's a temp issue somewhere.