Have to underclock Radeon 4850 core or PC crashes

[14 of a hotdog]

I have been having a problem with my 4850 for a while now. When I play Crysis, Mass Effect or occasionally when I play Fallout3 or Oblivion I will get several types strange crashes unless I underclock the core to 600 for Fallout and Oblivion or 550 for Crysis and Mass Effect.

The crashes vary sometimes I just get a black screen but the sound continues and I can shut down my pc with the keyboard but others I just get a black screen and the sound will stutter for a few seconds and it just Ether goes black or projects black or a color and a bunch of vertical lines that are usually green.

At first i thought it might be the drivers. So I waited for 9.4 and it did happen a lot less but i would still get crashes in Crysis and Mass Effect but the 9.5 drivers made it a lot worse and lowered my frame rates so i went back to 9.4. I had also tried cooling and fortunately I had an accelero s1 from my last card so I got some zalman copper heatsinks and put them on but it still crashed even with all temps below 55c. I did find out that I can still overclock the memory without any instability.

I have been looking this problem up constantly for the past few months and even though other people had the same problems none seems to have found a solution other than underclocking. Some of the people had replaced or sent the cards back to the manufacturer but they continued to have the problem. Though I someone suggested it was because of the motherboards only supporting pciex16 1.0 instead of 2.0 but unfortunately I don’t have the money to get a new motherboard to test that.


It also happens in furmark but not in 3dmark vantage. My system specks are in my profile aside from the gpu clock which was before I had tried it in games. Would overvolting the card help?

 

[klepto12]

have you turned the fan speed up on the card? also thats an xfx card just make them repair it or send ya a new one. i have a 4850 and play crysis and fallout no problems at 685 core so dont know why your having a propblem.

 

[tweakboy]

Perhaps you can leave the clock speeds, and turn up your fan. Take her to 100 percent with ATI Tray Tools ,

Then let us know if it crashes still... thx gl

 

[14 of a hotdog]

I guess I made my post to long sorry. I had tried that and than I tried putting an accelero s1 rev.2 on it with some copper ram heatsings and a 120mm fan but its the same.

with a room temerature of 23c the idle temps are with the default core clock.

gpu: 35c
gpu displayio: 35c
gpu memio: 43c
gpu shadercore: 40c
load: 0%

after 5 minutes of use they are

gpu: 45c
gpu displayio: 46c
gpu memio: 56c
gpu shadercore: 53c
load: 95%+

I used ati tools to heat it up and gpu-z to test the temps.

picture of card with cooling
http://i377.photobucket.com/albums/oo220/giganotasaurus/119_3028.jpg

 

[klepto12]

the load temps you posted are well withing working range i think you might call xfx support and ask for an rma.

 

[14 of a hotdog]

Ok should I record a video of a crash as proof?

 

[klepto12]

no just get a hold of xfx and tell them what its doing they will try to trouble shoot it then rma.

 

[timepolice]

sorry for resurrecting this thread but i'm having the problem also. how do i fix it? do i have to RMA my card?

 

[14 of a hotdog]

I found out later on that if you go into your bios (motherboard not graphics card.) and than set the PCIE clock to 100 not auto or normal it should work fine at normal gpu and vram clocks. It should even be able oveclock a little bit but I think it would need to be overvolted to overclock very high and be stable in games.

I would recomend looking up a guide and printing it If you do not know how to access your bios but here is a badly written guide. Fist just turn off your computer or restart it and after you turn it on or as it displays that first screen before it even posts, start hitting the delete key then if you are in the bios it will most likely be a blue menu that you have to navigate using the arrow keys and the enter button. Find something similar to motherboard tuning thing or what ever screen says things like FSB clock, multiplier, PCI voltage, PCIE frequency, and what ever else and find the PCIE frequency, then as I said set it to 100mhz because it can overclock itself if its set to normal or auto. Then get back to the main menu most likely with the escape key and click save to CMOS and exit select that and if it says are you sure you want to save and exit then just hit Y for yes then hit enter and it should start up fine. If not than try to undo what you did or if its not doing anything at all open the case and pull the small watch battery out for at least a minute maybe more then put it back in and it should be back to normal.

So if you set it to 100mhz and it still crashes you should get in contact with the company that manufactured your card (EVGA, MSI, XFX, SAPHIRE and so on) and tell them that it has been crashing in games. You should also try some software like furmark and tell them if it crashes in it so that they know that its not just the games and if the company that manufactured your card is anything like XFX it should be happy to test and replace it if it is found to be faulty. Also if you do have to ask them and send it in to be tested and replaced put as much detail into your messages to them as possible so they dont have to ask you to do that many things.

By the way is it any any 4800 series card that is crashing or something else?

PS I wrote this in a rush so sorry for the awful spelling and grammar.

 

[timepolice]

same card - ati radeon 4850 512mb. i tried to look for a 'pcie clock' in my bios (i've got msi mcp61) but couldn't find one. not even anything close to it. i think my board's locked by msi.

mobo: msi k9n6sgm-v mcp61

 

[14 of a hotdog]

I'm not sure which utility would be best but i think you could use a cpu overclocking program to change it. I cant find a good one that isn't designed for a specific brand of motherboards that can adjust the pcie frequency but I'm sure someone else here knows of one.

 

[timepolice]

google.com

been there.. how else do you think i found this thread?

anyway, update: i thought it was a problem with my mobo so i got a new one. still had the same problem (even with 100mhz manual pcie frequency). so what i did was, i sold my 4850 and got an nvidia gts 250 instead. the guy who bought my 4850 doesn't seem to be having any problem with it. i've already replaced most of my pc's parts for that damn card, only things i haven't replaced are the processor and memory. -_-