x850XT PE

[Malak]

Ok, I may have found the issue with my video card, and it may not be a faulty card at all. In fact, it may be a flaw in the software.

I have the new x850XT PE, had it for a few weeks now. A short time ago, I started getting bad artifacts in games. Never had artifacts before, so it was a new experience. However, it had come down to probably calling Alienware/ATI to RMA the card thinking it was bad. But on a hunch I did a search on google to see if anyone else was having the issue, thinking maybe it was the card and/or drivers that was doing it. Well, I may have found something. I did not install the control center, as I've heard it has issues in itself, and the classic control center doesn't have overdrive in it. So I assume overdrive is running and I have no way of controlling it. I am going to reinstall my drivers again, and install the new control center, in hopes of disabling overdrive and see if this is the cause of my artifacts. That article leads me to believe it is. Although overdrive sounds real nice, it seems to be SERIOUSLY bugged.

This post may be premature, and I will keep people updated, but it's a heads up to anyone with an x8xxXT series card.

 

[Malak]

Ok I've been digging further, and the issue may be deeper than overdrive, overdrive may simply increase the problem. The issue may actually be the memory clock speed. In an obscure post in a forum far far away, someone said they had similar issues and simply underclocked the memory by just 7mhz and haven't reported anymore issues. Overdrive actually OCs it as high as 600mhz over stock speeds! Obviously overdrive is pretty sweet in concept, doubling performance on the fly while gaming, but if the card can't handle it then it can be an issue. Overdrive seems to be off by default though, which would explain why I didn't experience these issues right off when I got the card.

I am installing ATITool again to underclock the card and see how it goes now.

 

[lavaheadache]

600 mhz thats a bit absurd. They really need to work the kinks out the overdrive feature. On my older 9600 xt if you set a specified clock speed in rage3d and then turned on overdrive the card would freak out and jump up even more mhz.

 

[Malak]

Well so far so good. We'll see how she's doing in a few days. Seems kind of odd that 7mhz could make a difference, so we'll keep at it and see if this is right.

 

[kylebisme]

Thats 6mhz, not 600. At least 6mhz is all overdrive does on the x800xt-pe. Also, thats 6mhz on the core only, and only when temps alow for it, overdrive never overclocks the memory at all. As for the memory needing a slight underclock, my x800xt-pe is the same way, but feel free to turn overdrive back on as that should cause any trouble at all.

 

[Malak]

Ok, I started getting artifacts again today, but it wasn't nearly as bad as before. I decided to check some more and I found out the video card's fan settings were kinda odd. It's default speed is 4%. That's awfully slow and it only goes up to 17% while gaming I think. So I made it faster in hopes of cooling the card down more while under load, it may simple be getting too hot.

 

[Elfear]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
Thats 6mhz, not 600. At least 6mhz is all overdrive does on the x800xt-pe. Also, thats 6mhz on the core only, and only when temps alow for it, overdrive never overclocks the memory at all. As for the memory needing a slight underclock, my x800xt-pe is the same way, but feel free to turn overdrive back on as that should cause any trouble at all.

The X850XT PE actually uses a new dynamic overdrive that works a lot like Coolbits. You can tell it to autodetect optimal clock settings and it will run some tests and oc both the processor and the memory. Some of the reviewers had theirs autodetect up to like 600/600 with no artifacts. Looks like it still has some bugs to be worked out of it though.

 

[Malak]

Well 60% fan speed seems to keep it cool enough. I monitored the temp of the video card while scanning for artifacts. The thing would get up to like 76 degrees pretty fast and it would get some artifacts. I bumped the fan speed up to 60% and it stays at 73 degrees, no higher, things run smooth. I figure if I bump the speed higher, I can move the clock on the memory to normal or even higher, same with core, without an issue. That's actually what I wanted to do in the first place, but took me a while to find out how to change the fan speed.

 

[Patrick Wolf]

I think ATI Tool itself can cause artifacts.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: wolfman579
I think ATI Tool itself can cause artifacts.

I was getting artifacts without it even installed.

 

[chinkgai]

by big issue i thot he meant after paying an arm and a leg for the card, he ran out of money for rent or something

 

[Patrick Wolf]

Originally posted by: chinkgai
by big issue i thot he meant after paying an arm and a leg for the card, he ran out of money for rent or something

I got mine for $499, that's including free shipping from Monarch.com. It was OEM. It was supposed to come today, but I was...napping. So I missed the FedEx man. :|

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: chinkgai
by big issue i thot he meant after paying an arm and a leg for the card, he ran out of money for rent or something

Nope, ordered it the day after they were announced so it was right on the money.