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4870s dropping like flies (due to user error/BIOS mods)? [Update: BIOS Fix available]

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chawks2

Member
Joined
Jun 24, 2004
Location
OG, CT
4870s dropping like flies (due to user error/BIOS mods)? [Update: BIOS Fix available]

There are rumors about several bad 4870s. Please post your experience.
 
You expect there to be a whole thread of people ready to post bad experiences when there isn't a single thread yet?
 
I may have been premature, but would like to hear just the same. We could change it to how, "AMD destroys nVidia", does have a better ring to it. :santa:
 
There are a few reports of people ocing the ram on the 4870s past 4800MHz and killing them in the process. thats all I have heard

(First I have heard of QDR btw)
 
myth busted.

People who do xtreme things will break stuff, my sister did that the whole time, no wait that was me ;)
 
A lot of people don't even have their 4870s yet wait till the end of next week if there aren't any replies then its a non issue.
 
This is very premature. As has been mentioned the only real issues are people seriously thrashing the cards via overclocking which is to be expected anyway. Seriously, I don't know how some people have the cash :p.
 
I've seen at XtremeSystems a lot of 4870 dead apparently for no reason at all, but it seems to be a relation with flashing the cards (all cases have happened between some hours and a few days after flashing the card bios). Maybe the software they're using to flash does something wrong, or the modified bios they're trying to flash IS wrong itself, and the result of that is a dead card.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=192759

I have not seen any other case of dead card until now, even if I have read about the VRAM thing (mainly here) I've not seen anybody that actually has killed his card in this way yet.
 
The guys over at Xtremesystems killed their cards by flashing the BIOS (heh, bad BIOS you think?) and doing other mods to them. Its also been said that the Qimonda GDDR5 is crappy. Samsung and Hynix will be shipping GDDR5 too so maybe we can wait for better memory. GDDR5 supposedly signals much differently and error corrects differently so try not to mess with it until people figure out how it behaves overclocked.

To avoid a hot mess on your hands, just don't flash the BIOS. There are some unknowns about how the GDDR5 works and it seems to be a factor.
 
I have kept up with the thread at Xtreme since I have one of these coming. If I remeber correctly, all the dead cards have been flashed except for 4 of them. That was a company that has some in their machines and they put 4 of them in Xfire (2 x 2 in 2 different machines). They died after that but the single machines are still working. As to it being the Qimonda chips, it was not the chips themselves that died in the 8800GT's. My GTS has the same chips but the power circuitry has been beefed up vs the GT, hence no problem with the GTS's. I would wait awhile before blaming the ram chips.

[edit]
BUt I do admit I may not be fast to list my GTS on the classifieds, just in case ;)
 
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The ironic thing is that most of the time the cards are fine, it's just that the BIOS is telling to card absurd things (to do). Like one thread on XS mentions a guy who had a good flash, the card failed the next day. He used it in slave mode (booted up under different card) then viewed GPU-Z on the card. It was clocked upwards of 20000MHZ!!! Basically, without the proper knowledge of EXACTLY what bit in the bios does/affects, things can go crazy. It is also worth noting that most failures are SOFTWARE failures, which can sometimes be recovered.
 
I've changed the thread title to fix Super Nade's crappy spelling. :D
 
I'm hesitant to flash motherboard bioses. I don't think I'd ever flash the bios on a video card. In fact I've always been a little more hesitant to even overclock video cards after my 7900 GT died.
 
I am actually glad this thread was made(even if it is premature). I wanna see how they go out of the box, and not with these ppl who voltmod, water cool, then flash the bios and cross their fingers. I wanna see how these will OC for the average person who won't tear the entire card down to get an extra 2Mhz.

And, as much as I hate to say it, I think my 8800GTX is going bad. My game performance has been terrible lately, I've checked everything out, my CPU/RAM usage is good. Just my FPS is absolutely awful. I tried those damn new nVidia 175.35 drivers and I had my games crash only to say that the video driver had stopped responding, so I quickly rolled back my driver. Lifetime warranty or not, I might have the 8800GTX replaced and put it in another PC and buy myself a 4870, 9800GTX, or GTX260/280.
 
The main reason for these card failures is because people flash and mod these cards without testing it properly determining it's limits, I don't think it is a RAM flaw or design issue at all. Once Rivatuner brings us an update we can test the cards the proper way before flashing the bios with OC profiles
 
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