help with my new asus 3870x2

[d3fct]

hi guys, yesterday i installed my new asus 3870x2, I was amazed by the size barely fits in my thermaltake case, anyways back to the problem. I installed the newest catalyst drivers, seemed to work fine in bf2 played lastnight for a few hours, then today i played around with overclocking it, using atitray tools and the ati control panel utility. every time i hit autotune in the control panel utility i get bsod caused by ati error, i get same crash if i try to run the renderer in ati tools to test clock speed for artifacts. I know its some sort of ati issue, i just made the switch from nvidia so i'm not very familiar with ati's drivers(wich are stable, best performance, etc.). any help or advice would be appreciated. I almost forgot i also read in a forum that ati's fans run @ 25%, im not concerned about the noise factor, so if anyone knows how to run the fan @ 100% that would be handy.


system specs

asus rampage
8400 @ 4.3
2x2gb g.skill ddr2 1000
750w corsair psu
thermaltake bigwater l/c
asus 3870x2

[d3fct]

forgot to add, i also get a crash when i load up gpuz 2.4. or everest and yes i tried with (system) default setting in my bios, no overclock. same result, thanks in advance if anyone has a suggestion. i didnt have any problems with nvidia cards 2 days ago, seems the switch to ati was a big mistake, very unstable drivers.

[dng]

i also have an asus 3870x2. it's the original version with the sticker, not the dual fan version. which version do you have? to get the fan to run at 100%, use rivatuner. i had to use rivatuner and set the fan to run at 100% because some games were so demanding that the card would crashed. after i enable 100% speed on the fan, no more crashes. i have not oc my card as it gets too hot already at default speeds for gpu/mem. i don't know if default settings in the bios is a good thing when you're ocing your card. i had to tweak my bios settings a bit to make the card runs stable. i will try to help you out as much as you can.

[d3fct]

ok, thanks for the help. I meant i set the cpu to default in the bios not gpu, sorry for confusion. I have the dual fan asus 3870x2, i tried riva tuner to get the fan at 100% but when i click apply the slider moves back to 25%, so I assumed it didnt work. Also i did a thermal paste replacement before i even installed the card, plus i have a big 235cm case fan blowing on it so i would hope temps wont be an issue, i can always add it to my liquid cooling loop if necesary. I'm not even able to run atitray tools or atitools render to check for artifacts, so i havent even begun to oc the gpu's yet. i would like to get the card stable before i attemp an oc. what version of catalyst drivers are you running, im using 8.6. I never thought to turn up the pcie frequency in the bios, just thought of it, maybee i will try that and see if stablizes the card.

[d3fct]

another thought, im running sp3.....

[Edin]

Hi there, when I got my first Sapphire HD3870X2 I had exactsame thing like you, the card would be running fine the game but when trying to run stability test with ATT I had black screens and system restarts... I have no idea what was causing it. I ended up returing the card after a week as I thought there was something not right with the card. Few weeks later I got another Sapphire HD3870X2 from different store and I had it running untill now... didn't get issues with it, so maybe it was just a bit dodgy card but I can't really know.. just one of those things with hardware I guess.

By the way I alsouse XP Pro SP3 (I think I had XP Pro SP2 only installed at that time though) and my PSU is dual 650W/550W that comes in Antec P190 case... with the second card I did flush the BIOS and made all 3D clocks the same (I believe this card has low and high settings for GPU in 3D)

[d3fct]

so you got a new card and all is well?

[Edin]

Could be the card, could be the different drives (I did buy the second card about 1-2 months later) so I can't really be sure what was causing it but yeah, with the secont card I got I don't have many issues at all, sure I get occasional game crash (I play mainly LockOn only) but am very positive it's not the card causing it and that it's just buggy game or maybe mods or online server settings related.

[d3fct]

well its not the card i just installed vista on my other hdd and everything works perfect in vista, so im wondering if its an sp3 issue. deffinatly something i have installed on xp it does not like, i think i will try a fresh install of xp without updates and try to figure it out.

[d3fct]

it does it on a fresh sp2 install, must be xp...

[Edin]

Gees, thats' weird... Vista runs without crashes and XP not?

[d3fct]

yes vista runs perfectly not one issue, but i cant run the video card to save my life in xp!

[d3fct]

ok i just ran dxdiag and it bsod on the test direct 3d wouldnt even load i think its the directx box that spins around the monitor. and i wrote the bsod down this time, its ati2dvag.dll. Any idea's? im leaning towards a directx issue, vista runs directx 10 correct? that might be why it works flawlessly in vista and not in xp.

[d3fct]

problem fixed, sent it back to newegg.