Quote Originally Posted by DemonsBlood View Post
its not a ref PCB, it is one of the two custom PCB's which retain the ability to change voltage. The other being the ASUS DirectCU version, which I have. I believe that your card is just borked... but in general my feel is that these custom PCB are just not very good with voltage... it takes me well over stock voltages (its at 1.1813) to reach anything above 830... whereas reference PCBs can easily achieve 850+ on stock voltages alone.

Sigh, I would ask them to issue an RMA because their advertised voltage control does not work to some extent...because it is a selling point to that card! Good luck!
Yeah, definitely not reference. I sent it back to Newegg I just told the guy that i was unhappy with it and he authorized a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fee. Newegg is frickin awesome. I was still within my 30 day return so they had to take it back, but not charging the restocking or shipping was icing on the cake baby!

I know have an Asus EAH5850 DirectCU. I really wanted a reference model, but they are hard to find. I saw a couple of places that had the Visiontek, but couldn't find any in stock.

This card is definitely much better. I'm sitting at 1000Ggz GPU right now, although it's taking me 1.3 volts to do it. The GPU is under water so i'm not worried about it. I am concerned about the PWM circuitry though. It gets quite hot to the touch. Do any of you have any recommendations on the max voltage for this thing? I'm talking 24/7 use. I don't want this thing to die young. I'm thinking of mounting a fan on the small heatsink that covers the PWM area to help keep it cool.

I'm going to experiment a little bit more and see if i can get the volts a little lower, but i'm pretty sure from my testing so far that this is what it's going to take.

I had a very similar issue with my 4830s and it was indeed a issue with the BIOS on the cards. I fixed it by cross referencing the PCB with different BIOSes from other manufacturers until I found one 100% compatible. If its anything like my issue, it may not be a easy fix and tech support will be useless.
That's interesting. I'm wondering if an eventual BIOS fix might have done it for the Twin Frozr, but i wasn't going to wait around. I tried flashing it to the 5870 Lighting BIOS since they use what looks to be the same PCB and they use the same UP6266 voltage regulator. It took the flash, but it still had the same issue with upping the voltage, instant black screen on 3D.

Should being the operative word. Doesn't mean they will sadly.
Yes, SHOULD, definitely doesn't mean WILL. It came down to them telling me it was a bad batch of GPUs from AMD. Haven't heard of anyone else with this problem on other models of 5850s though so i'm still not convinced of this. Either way, that's all the help i was going to get so i sent that baby back.

Oddly enough, upon removal of the card, i noticed it appears there was some residue (that leftover residue from solder flux) around some of the solder joints on one of the caps, and around one of the chokes. This thing has probably already been RMA'd by someone else, unless it didn't pass quality control after manufacture and those components had to be replaced. Oh well, not my problem anymore.