I wanted to bring these topics back to your intention, in case you either missed or intentionally ignored me.

Quote Originally Posted by cegras View Post
What 'specifications' is the card exceeding? I read through your first post but found no mention of design specs, nor links to published specs on AMD's website.
Also, it doesn't really matter if the card crashes on a 1500W or 550W.

If the OCP is, as you hypothesize, set to 82A maximum, then are you not exceeding design specifications by running this test? In this case, is it not the same as overclocking - do so at your own risk?

Quote Originally Posted by SparkyJJO View Post
OK I downloaded it, set the settings, and ran it. Nice fuzzy red donut thingy waving around on my screen. Got bored of it after a few minutes and shut it off. How long is it supposed to be before it was to black out?

My 4870 is overclocked to 790 core too by the way (highest stupid CCC will allow me).
Quote Originally Posted by villa1n View Post


No black Screen here. Gecube 4870, and Sapphire 4870 1gb in Xfire. I didn't like how high the temps went up, in such a short time though!! That is an intense test.

To address the real world application of it... Any game that would put this kind of stress on hardware, would be out of business pretty quick, considering most of us here, have decent hardware, versus the masses... I dont think many Dell's or E-machines would last haha.
As for not being able to use the "full" potential of the card, it seems ATI designed the card for the 99.9% of people who will never hit this wall, they could have made the card impervious to this, by adding more pwm/vrm to the card..but at a cost. I don't see why the cost benefit analysis isn't surprising.. this condition will not surface in the wild, and for those that it does, its cheaper to RMA those few cards, than it is, to design change it to meet such strenuous rare occurances. That said, my cards worked fine, i just dont want to fry them for no reason :P