finally had to exchange my 4850!

[Foxery]

Holy crap. Start a blog is you need to be emo on the internet.

And, guys... don't feed the trolls.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Creig
Keys, I'm not quite sure why you're defending this guy. Did you not read his original post?

Now I have the Visiotek 4850 with MSI Bios with bios fan tweak. Everything was working fine before this though. But could it be that the MSI bios and/or fan tweak be messin up my fan spooling?? Like I said, MSI bios and fan tweak was working fine.

Anyway, since I bought it from BB and still under 30 days, I exchanged it no problem. Best Buy had no problem exchanging it.

Keys: Probably because I'm really not. I don't condone returning equipment that has been damaged by the user. Like someone else has said, it may end up in the hands of the next guy. We've all seen it happen, and it will continue to happen. We can't stop them. So, no more use complaining about it. I've done mine long ago. To no avail.

He modded the card and then returned it to the store. Since when does Best Buy allow you to mod your card and then exchange it if it suddenly starts acting up? And it wasn't just the BIOS he altered:

Keys: Yes, he messed with his card. But "why" is the better question here.

I did change the thermal paste before even installing the card, so I don't know the temp with the old paste. But I did noticed the old thermal paste was a bit hard, so I just slap on a fresh patch.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2199828

So he mods the card by changing the thermal paste, flashes another manufacturer's BIOS onto it and then returns it to the store because it's "malfunctioning". Uh-huh... I didn't think we condoned that sort of behavior here or allowed people to discuss doing it.

Keys: Not many of us condone it, as I have said already, and I agree with you. But, there isn't much we can do about it except complain.
If we happen to get a clue who the guy is and what vendor he bought it from, then we can give the vendor a heads up if possible.

To me, anybody who mods their equipment before testing it to ensure it's stable in its stock configuration has no idea what they're doing no matter how much XML, BIOS and driver info they're spouting.

Keys: I never said he "knew" what he was doing. I said he seemed to know too much "about" XML BIOS and driver info to NOT have a 4850.
That is all.

 

[unr3al]

I nearly laughed my head off here. What do you expect? A perfect product from the get-go? Thats why there ARE things like DRIVER UPDATES. They are intended to fix ERRORS in PREVIOUS RELEASES. If I had to complain like this about every driver error I got, I would go mad! Just put up, shut up and enjoy the fact that you have one of the most advanced (not to mention fast!) graphics accelerators in the market to date. I would happily wait for stable drivers (if you actually had what I would call driver problems...) if I could afford that card. Soon, perhaps. But then again I'll probably just wait for the HD4650...

 

[Mem]

All I'm going to say is my personal experience with my 4870 card upgrading from a 7800GT.
I have been using both ATI/Nvidia cards for a long time now and go back and forth depending what's best value for performance at the time.

My Gigabyte 4870 came with the usual bundle ie cables,DVI TO VGA,DVI-HDMI,6 pin PCIe power adaptor to molex,Crossfire bridge etc...,CD with drivers (no games).

Installing the card was not without issues, however the main issue was with my old Nvidia drivers,basically after uninstalling via Control Panel and using DriverSweeper in safe mode,shut down PC after and installed my 4870 card. I still had 3 Nvidia DLL files trying to load at desktop(Nvidia you need to work on a clean uninstall of your drivers,in my case with Vista x64).
Anyway using Regedit I soon removed those without problems.

Installed the 8.6 hotfix drivers(I never bothered with the supplied ones on CD) I was impressed with the image quality and quietness of my 4870 card(I'm using DVI cable).
My card idles at 79/80c and can reach 92c when I run FurMark(great little program for stability/stress testing well beyond normal gaming) however it was rock stable and showed no artifacts.

I did play around with the XML fan profile hack but my fan gets loud above 31%,unfortunately I could not use the automatic setting with fan speed of my choice in the XML file, so had to use manual command,in the end I put it back to normal on automatic and 23% since I had no gaming/stability issues with various games I tested like Mass Effect,Oblivion,UT2004,Mythos,EQ2 etc..

My case cooling is 4x80mm (two fans blowing and two sucking,plus 120mm on my PSU ,gets cleaned by me now and then).
Once all the well known fan speed/OC programs have it working down the road then I'll play around with the fan speed again,I feel I don't need to use a third party cooler at this time.

Personally I think its a great card with very nice image quality,I feel however AMD/ATI set the idle fan speed a little too low and all their partners could of maybe included a decent free game ,however it has not effected my gaming or general use of the card.
I went with Gigabyte because of the 3 year warranty and price of the card in the UK(was lowest price I have seen here),choices here are Asus,Gainward,Gigabyte,GeCube,Sapphire,Club3D,HIS,PowerColor,basically everything expect Visiontek(not seen any listed in UK).

I give it 9/10 ,lost a point because of the above 🙂.

 

[taltamir]

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=11871

Every ASUS EAH4800 Series graphics card will also soon be equipped with the Glaciator Fansink

The age of 3rd party cooler has arrived, and since the bios fix for power play is out already, we can expect it to also be applied... thus this version, and others like it, would be completely devoid of problems.

Originally posted by: Creig
Keys, I'm not quite sure why you're defending this guy. Did you not read his original post?

Now I have the Visiotek 4850 with MSI Bios with bios fan tweak. Everything was working fine before this though. But could it be that the MSI bios and/or fan tweak be messin up my fan spooling?? Like I said, MSI bios and fan tweak was working fine.

Anyway, since I bought it from BB and still under 30 days, I exchanged it no problem. Best Buy had no problem exchanging it.

He modded the card and then returned it to the store. Since when does Best Buy allow you to mod your card and then exchange it if it suddenly starts acting up? And it wasn't just the BIOS he altered:

I did change the thermal paste before even installing the card, so I don't know the temp with the old paste. But I did noticed the old thermal paste was a bit hard, so I just slap on a fresh patch.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2199828

So he mods the card by changing the thermal paste, flashes another manufacturer's BIOS onto it and then returns it to the store because it's "malfunctioning". Uh-huh... I didn't think we condoned that sort of behavior here or allowed people to discuss doing it.

On a side note, anybody who mods their equipment before testing it to ensure it's stable in its stock configuration has no idea what they're doing no matter how much XML, BIOS and driver info they're spouting.

There are huge threads of people who have temperature problems with these cards, and then use exactly what he did to FIX THEM...

The MSI bios fix is needed because power play, a feature of the card, is broken in early bios versions... and visiontek has yet to release their own fixed bios. However the cards ARE IDENTICAL. opening the bios in RBE you see that they were both manufactured by "Wekiva" and that it is an "RV770 B50102" Board and have the exact same bios (well, early on, later MSI versions have a newer bios).
http://www.techpowerup.com/vga...0&interface=&memSize=0
Notice the dates... MSI has two bios versions:
MSI__v1: 2008-05-23 11:36:00
Visiontek: 2008-05-23 11:36:00
MSI__v2: 2008-06-05 16:52:00

Every single manufacturer has the older bios version, the one from may 23rd 08 at 11:36AM.
Newer bios version (same one) is also available from powercooler and sapphire cards.
MSI, powercooler, and sapphire's newer bios is from june 5th 08, at 4:52pm.

It is completely identical aside for a table entry for "manufacturer", which you can set in the RBE.

Every report also indicates that the thermal paste used it so poor, that it acts more as an isolator then a conductor.

Returning it to the store was only a mistake because his manual fan settings were overriding his auto spool settings AS THEY SHOULD HAVE, so the card wasn't actually broken. anyone who buys it now as open box is getting a BETTER version, not a broken version, because the fixes have already been applied...

If you see above, asus has completely ditched the crap OEM cooler for their own cooler that works, and the bios on newer cards should be the later, fixed one...

ATI wrote the bios for all of them anyways. And there is absolutely no harm in cross flashing from companies.

What I want to know is why are you pointlessly bashing him for doing it.. you might as well bash someone for getting a defective car, replacing the BRAKE PADS with "Other manufacturer's brake pads", and then returning it as a lemon for a replacement.
If you want to accuse him of something, at least accuse him SENSIBLY like some other people have done... and that is.. accuse him of not being fair towards ATI, in that ALL tech manufacturers today have to operate like this to survive. Even then, just because the accusation holds a bit of merit doesn't mean he is wrong to expect better.
After this though, he should know better, and that it is what is to be expected from everyone, not just ATI.

 

[Mem]

Every single manufacturer has the older bios version, the one from may 23rd 08 at 11:36AM.
Newer bios version (same one) is also available from powercooler and sapphire cards.
MSI, powercooler, and sapphire's newer bios is from june 5th 08, at 4:52pm.

Interesting,looks like my Gigabyte 4870 Bios is listed as 9th June 2008 via CCC.

 

[taltamir]

that is a 4870, not a 4850...

tech power up has only 4 bios versions for the 4870:
http://www.techpowerup.com/vga...0&interface=&memSize=0
all from 2008-06-09 16:25:00
like yours, they are from 9ths of june 08 at 4:25pm...

Notice that gigabyte is not one of them... if you did NOT modify it, please use gpu-z to upload it. There is a chip with an up arrow next to the bios version in the main page of GPU-z, click it.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: taltamir
that is a 4870, not a 4850...

tech power up has only 4 bios versions for the 4870:
http://www.techpowerup.com/vga...0&interface=&memSize=0
all from 2008-06-09 16:25:00
like yours, they are from 9ths of june 08 at 4:25pm...

Notice that gigabyte is not one of them... if you did NOT modify it, please use gpu-z to upload it. There is a chip with an up arrow next to the bios version in the main page of GPU-z, click it.

Yep I know,can read 😉,as to updating my Gigabyte BIOS I already tried that yesterday said "already part of our collection",its not modded.