The HD 3870/50 Thread

[kyussinchains]

my 3850 arrived today, time to set it up, I'll post my results ASAP!

 

[OnDborder]

Yes, pencil modded.

Which one? "First" or "New" by Demolitionman? Or both?

 

[toddm27]

I doubt it since the stock cooler lacks heat pipes and less overall surface area of the S1. It may be ignorance, but all signs point to the S1 beating it hands down.

ok, no point in arguing about it, install it and find out, I'm just telling you my experience with the 2, stock cooler was 7-10c cooler with the fan at 100%, compared to the s1 with 2 50cfm yate loons strapped to it, good luck

 

[kyussinchains]

ok, got it installed, I had to move my hard drive, and to do that had to take my memory out, after putting it all back together it didnt post, just did a long beep....

so, I removed the radeon and plugged into my old graphics card, still the beep.... so I removed the ram entirely and it did the same. I put the ram into the other two sockets and it worked! must have been some dust.

so, I've downloaded the newest drivers and installed them, but the CCC wont load, the error message is long and full of error codes, so I just did a screen grab (sorry it's tiny.....)



any ideas? I've installed steam and registered my card with ATi, I updated my .net framework too.... I'm stuck!

edit: I'm running win XP-64, as far as I can tell, I've only got SP1 at the moment, I'll get the x64 SP2 and see if that fixes anything....

edit: downloaded SP2, no change.... I'm going to try uninstalling the drivers, then resetting and reinstalling

edit: well, I can now get into catalyst control centre, I removed the drivers, rebooted and reinstalled them and now it appears to be fine, a quick benchmark and then off to bed!

 

[IAmMoen]

So I was pumped to get my sapphire 3870. Put it in and installed the drivers. Fired up Day of Defeat: source. It will run at 70fps for 3 seconds then drop like a rock to 20fps then back up then down then up. Making it really hard to play. Considering my stock 7900gs didn't do that dip thing, the fact that it would do like 45fps but stay there helps out more. Any ideas?

7.12 drivers. XP64. The rest of the computer specs below.

 

[OC nub]

So I was pumped to get my sapphire 3870. Put it in and installed the drivers. Fired up Day of Defeat: source. It will run at 70fps for 3 seconds then drop like a rock to 20fps then back up then down then up. Making it really hard to play. Considering my stock 7900gs didn't do that dip thing, the fact that it would do like 45fps but stay there helps out more. Any ideas?

7.12 drivers. XP64. The rest of the computer specs below.

I'm having the same problem in FEAR Combat using Vista. Get around 300 fps for 30 seconds then boom, drops to 20. Plays COD4 fine. After using the 3870's for a short while now I will have to say I'm not that impressed from a gaming standpoint. It does score nice when over clocked in 3DMark but until the Guru's of 3D come out with a multi player version of 06 I'll stick with my Nvidia 8800. With the same settings in COD4 the game runs much smoother on a single 8800.

 

[WonderingSoul]

So I was pumped to get my sapphire 3870. Put it in and installed the drivers. Fired up Day of Defeat: source. It will run at 70fps for 3 seconds then drop like a rock to 20fps then back up then down then up. Making it really hard to play. Considering my stock 7900gs didn't do that dip thing, the fact that it would do like 45fps but stay there helps out more. Any ideas?

7.12 drivers. XP64. The rest of the computer specs below.

I have the same Sapphire 3870 and I am fine in DoD:S. You may just need a fresh DoD:S install. I had the same issue with CSS a while back, a reinstall worked for me.

PS; add me to your steam friends, meta_abuse. I am always playing DoD:S

 

[Coreyhm1]

I noticed the problems with the 7.12 drivers. You can roll back to 7.11 untill a newer version is released. I think what its doing is when the GPU gets a lower load (like 25% or something) it downclocks, then when it realizes its still in a game it clocks back up again causing the lag . I dont have that problem in FEAR, only TDU and DiRT. Im still using the 7.12 drivers mainly for Crysis..

When it starts it, open Rivatuner and let the monitor run. Post a screen shot, you will see what im talking about.

Ill try to reinstall those games and see what happens.

 

[vixro]

I don't have any issues with the 7.12's in XP. IN fact I notice game crashes in 7.11 with Guild Wars that went away with 7.12


This is a perfect example that the same driver set isn't the best for everyone. Try a load of 7.11 and see if it fixes your DoD problems.

 

[IAmMoen]

I have the same Sapphire 3870 and I am fine in DoD:S. You may just need a fresh DoD:S install. I had the same issue with CSS a while back, a reinstall worked for me.

PS; add me to your steam friends, meta_abuse. I am always playing DoD:S

Nice to see another dod:s player around here. You have been added. Just a question though, what drivers are you using? Oh and how do you "reinstall" dods? Just delete the local content and download again?

 

[Jacobman]

3850 512 @ 720/950

 

[WonderingSoul]

Nice to see another dod:s player around here. You have been added. Just a question though, what drivers are you using? Oh and how do you "reinstall" dods? Just delete the local content and download again?

I am using the 7.12 drivers. To reinstall, just right click and delete local content Make sure you do a backup if you got a lot of custom maps, redownloading them blows. I have over 2.5Gb of maps

 

[IAmMoen]

3850 512 @ 720/950

ok. I just ran 3dmark06 and with my 3870 @ 845/1200 and my opteron at 2.6 I got about 9200. It seems like there is something really wrong with my setup and I might blame it on the xp64. Course it might be the 7.12's.

Any xp64 owners out there with input on which drivers to use?

edit: (9192 in '06 to be exact)

 

[Coreyhm1]

Thats probably about right with an operton, or no?

I got 10733 with cpu at 3.3ghz and card at 860/1200

 

[Jacobman]

ok. I just ran 3dmark06 and with my 3870 @ 845/1200 and my opteron at 2.6 I got about 9200. It seems like there is something really wrong with my setup and I might blame it on the xp64. Course it might be the 7.12's.

Any xp64 owners out there with input on which drivers to use?

edit: (9192 in '06 to be exact)

We are both severely CPU bottlenecked, i got a free set of new g skill ram which let me OC my cpu another 250mz and that alone boosted me 900 points, lol. I was at 8,060 with 2.35 proc and now 8900 with 2.6 lol.

 

[Evilsizer]

did you look to see if your SM2 or SM3 scores went up? cause you can gain more in 3dmark from just ocing the cpu. that doesnt really mean that your gaining anything FPS wise for the gpu.

 

[toddm27]

Update: volted up to 1.55 both cards.

how did you get to 1.55v? what ohms are you at on that resistor? best I could do was about 500 ohms and that netted about 1.48v on my cards, very nice regardless
edit I'm assuming you're doing the 2 pads now instead of the resistor? just curious what ohms it took to get to 1.55v

 

[brakezone]

I think he just pencil modded it.

 

[kyussinchains]

after playing some games and generally mucking about with my 3850 I have to say that this card is the dog's danglies!!!

my only slight worry is that 3dmark03 crashes and my computer reboots at the same point whenever I run it, I'm going to re-install it and see if it was due to corruption or something....

I can now run supreme commander in 1280x768 with 4xAA and everything on high, as smooth as a baby's bottom (although when I get into some big firefights I imagine things will chugalug due to my crappy processor!)

3dmark03 was reporting an average of around 450fps before it crashed, compared to the 5-10 I was getting beforehand that's a big increase!

 

[HousERaT]

I used the new pencil mod method (see front page of the thread). It's easier to get the resistance down using the new method. I'm not using both methods at the same time and don't even know if that would help.