ATI HD4800 Review Thread

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

i have a HIS 4580 which i have abused and its going strong still right now... flashed maybe 6-7 times trying different clocks after voltmodding. am sitting at 725/1050 which seems to be its sweet spot. i do have it on water tho... still if it does pop i wont be blaming ati... also my card was pretty weak on stock volts anyway, was only syable at 650 on the core so i needed to abuse it anyways..

4850's are not the issue, they are all fine, its the 4870's and the gddr5 that has problems

[Unbornchild]

its the 4870's and the gddr5 that has problems

It's not. It's a few people trying to flash them and failed.
Stop spreading false rumour.

[SimBy]

OK guys it seems most of deaths were actually caused by truncated bios.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post3101668

I guess warning still stands. DO NOT FLASH THE CARDS.

[biohead]

It's not. It's a few people trying to flash them and failed.
Stop spreading false rumour.

sigh. this seems to go back and forth without result. basically nobody has a clue, yet.

[wiak]

This thread has now taken a hilarious turn. There is a REASON BIOS flashing isn't covered by the warranty and we are seeing exactly why.

Show me where large batches of non flashed, non-overclocked cards are dying (taking into account that people who experience a problem are more likely to whine than those who don't) and maybe we will have something.

Until then it is just a matter of people wading into BIOS flashing without thinking of the ramifications.

agree, someone should setup a poll
there will allways be a bad batch, just look at RAM, might well be some chips that are fried, it happends

[golfjam]

I have a pair of HD4850 and HD4870. When I run Vantage, 4850 CF doesn't show any artifacts and I get p10k+. However, I get a bunch of artifacts on 4870cf but I'm able to finish the benchmark and get p12k+. I'm installing games now. We'll see what happens.

[Hornet331]

It's not. It's a few people trying to flash them and failed.
Stop spreading false rumour.

your talking to a guys whos 4870 have faild without ocing or flashing.

[Unbornchild]

You believe that, read this again.

[wiak]

everyone with a 800 shader paperweight aka broken no-boot 4870
http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/...ng/vidcard/152
fix for you! from teh w1zz

[Caveman787]

I see one problem with that...does everyone have a replacement video card to boot from?

Also which review is the best?

and has anyone found out what speed cpu unlocks the full power of the 4870?

[GoldenTiger]

I see one problem with that...does everyone have a replacement video card to boot from?

Not always of course, but a PCI or PCI-Express cheapie card can be picked up from a local shop for $5-20 depending on your luck, a small hassle but worth it and cheaper/quicker than buying a whole new card of the same type . Alternatively, if you have a friend with a computer (I think most of us do!) you could ask if you can borrow their videocard for a few minutes .

[Xoulz]

well whatever, cant say i didnt warn em

Warn us of what...? That you can buy a video card and have it not work or frazzle within a week..?

Sorry, thats been the norm for 10 years! Your not out anything but time and a possible few $ for shipping. Though I think we all thank you for the obvious heads-up!




.

[Hornet331]

You believe that, read this again.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...&postcount=529

[zerazax]

It doesn't matter. If you changed the fan speed even, the original BIOS dump was half the size of what it should have been so it didn't matter if you OC'd or not - all you had to do was change the BIOS and back to the wrong file.

Either way, it seems like a lot of those that were bricked were fixed as the correct size (1Mbit) is now being used. Obviously the ones that truly weren't touched and died have to be investigated or RMA'd, but it looks like those who played with the BIOSes early no longer have to worry as the fix has been put up.

[mr2sw21]

It doesn't matter. If you changed the fan speed even, the original BIOS dump was half the size of what it should have been so it didn't matter if you OC'd or not - all you had to do was change the BIOS and back to the wrong file.

Either way, it seems like a lot of those that were bricked were fixed as the correct size (1Mbit) is now being used. Obviously the ones that truly weren't touched and died have to be investigated or RMA'd, but it looks like those who played with the BIOSes early no longer have to worry as the fix has been put up.

so is the stock bios is a problem bios or it is ok? I mean the stock bios is it the full size bios?

[zerazax]

The stock BIOS is fine. What was happening supposedly was that GPU-Z and RBE were truncating the BIOS to 61kb files or so rather than the full 128kb which caused cards to die. Dave Baumann notified W1z about it and they found a fix with the help of some XS members and the correct BIOS is now on the site if your card died after a flash. A lot of members have revived their cards already..

[bill_d]

now thats over
any pictures of that watercooled diamond 4870 oc

[hstuehmeyer2000]

The stock BIOS is fine. What was happening supposedly was that GPU-Z and RBE were truncating the BIOS to 61kb files or so rather than the full 128kb which caused cards to die. Dave Baumann notified W1z about it and they found a fix with the help of some XS members and the correct BIOS is now on the site if your card died after a flash. A lot of members have revived their cards already..

In the past all (consumer) graphics card BIOSes were smaller than 64 KBytes. With the introduction of GDDR5 additional space was required for the memory training code. Since ATI could not fit that piece of code into the 64 KB available, they increased the BIOS size to 128 KB (1 MBit).

For an unknown reason ATI's flashing software Winflash/Atiflash does not correctly detect those extra 64 KB and forgets to save them when you dump your BIOS to a file. The same happens to GPU-Z (fixed in 0.2.5 and newer). So everybody who extracted their HD 4870 BIOS ended up with no GDDR5 microcode.

from here, http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/...ng/vidcard/152

[disruptfam]

It's not. It's a few people trying to flash them and failed.
Stop spreading false rumour.

Qft

[AliG]

OK guys it seems most of deaths were actually caused by truncated bios.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=1#post3101668

I guess warning still stands. DO NOT FLASH THE CARDS.

not at all, if you use the new fixed bios from techpowerup you'll be fine, the issue was due to not all of the bios's cache being detected and half of it not being saved, but that's fixed now so its no big deal if you have the right bios flashing tool (that detects the whole bios) and right bios

[865pe]

My Sapphire 4870 user review.

with my old 9800gtx OC vs 4870 performance

http://forum.donanimhaber.com/m_24357058/tm.htm

[SimBy]

not at all, if you use the new fixed bios from techpowerup you'll be fine, the issue was due to not all of the bios's cache being detected and half of it not being saved, but that's fixed now so its no big deal if you have the right bios flashing tool (that detects the whole bios) and right bios

Yeah true use the correct bios and ull be fine.

[Mr.X]

Can someone clarify if my motherboard (P5W DH) will be a bottleneck for a single HD4870? If so how much of a performance loss would that mean?

[AliG]

why would it be a bottleneck? Right now we're looking at maybe 10x-12x Pci_e 1.1 is used, not even the entire x16, you won't lose any performance by not going to pci_e 2.0

[Mumid]

why would it be a bottleneck? Right now we're looking at maybe 10x-12x Pci_e 1.1 is used, not even the entire x16, you won't lose any performance by not going to pci_e 2.0

If that is true why do P45's bottleneck them in crossfire compared to x48 or has that now been proven to be false?