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Originally Posted by SKYMTL  Would someone link me to some of these "recuring issues"? I ask because even this reviewer is having heaps of problems with CF'd HD4850 cards. |
1. Well the first issue most commonly noted was a poorly configured "Fan Profile" with most commenting their cards were idling at ~70C with 2-3% Fan at 70 (0% below 70). That was over come with the modded Fan Profile and the originator has now created several levels of BIOS for the 4850:
Bios By Bret - Guru3D.com Forums
2. The second most common issue was games freezing, VPU recoveries and or even BSOD. For me I would freeze (no VPU option had to close via task manager) in Oblivion on the 6.8 Hotfix with Q6600@3.15GHz, with modded fan profile of 60% GPU@68-70C and CPU cores in low 50's, I don't think heat was the issue. I Installed 8.7 Beta (used Drive Cleaner Pro to scrub clean etc etc) and this issue in Oblivion was overcome. With Crysis I would freeze and or even BSOD with the 8.7Beta and tried upping MCH and FSB a little but still kept freezing so out of frustration I lowered my OC Q6600@3.01GHz and returned Voltages to Auto (except vDIMM@2.1MHz, even though RAM is underclocked (334MHz) I have 4Gb). I finally got Crysis stability (have more recently installed the 8.7 but haven't tried to regain OC yet). I will be undertaking a cooling project this week (removing the cosmetic NB and SB covers and refreshing TIM, also making a memory cooler). In both cases I have been monitoring temps of GPU, CPU and Motherboard and find that these are residing well within my comfort zone. This has lead me to believe that heat is not an issue but either vMCH and or vFSB and or PCI-e Freq MHz (or a combination of these factors). It reminds me of hitting a FSB wall and seeing vDroop dropping below the 1.3v threshold and OCCT erroring. Will try experimenting with slightly higher PCI-e Frequency when my cooling project has finished. I think I will use CCC to adjust clocks, GPU-z to monitor and then ATiTool to scan for artifacts at different clocks relative to different frequencies (will explore upto 110MHz).