21 replies to this topic

[FMod]

The temperature only went up to 60-62 degrees Celsius during peak performance, so it's a pretty cool card.

Headroom for overclocking then.

I just experienced a BSOD with the error message that 'reset display driver has timed out.' This was just after exiting Skyrim and loading up Firefox. I looked around the AMD GPU forums and apparently this is a frequent issue many users have experienced with past and current catalyst drivers.

There are some glitches, but they are by no means frequent. You might find some fixes or ways to mitigate it if you look around.

I am concerned this card will expire shortly after it's warranty, which GPUs now days tend to do given current industry standards.

This is unlikely. Video cards usually die due to solder interface cracking. This is mostly a problem with high-heat chips - 7900GTX, 8800, 280, 480. Less common for 580, HD5970, HD6970, sometimes VRM give out on 570.

7850 is a cool midrange card and the solder interface on Radeons is more stable, so there's no particular reason for it to fail prematurely.

[kalikka]

I have 2 r7950 rigs, never had any issues with drivers. Sure I had some crashes but never BSOD, and the crashes were because of my 1200/1500mhz OCs...
If your VRM/core temperatues are under 70C, there shouldnt be any problems with the lifetime of the card. All the older-gen cards used to have +90C VRM temperatures... Heck, the Vapor-X 7950 card has problems with the VRM cooling giving it some insane temperature readings even with stock-clocks (PC shutting down because of overheating while furmarking, etc.).

Edited by kalikka, 26 January 2013 - 03:52 PM.

[ripple]

Thanks for the assurances

Another thing I've noticed is occasional artifacting during Skyrim. I don' have any screenshots of it because it comes and goes really quickly (like....split second), and only happens when the GPU is being stressed, like in crafting menus. I can tell the crafting menus stress the GPU because Afterburner always shows GPU temperature increase when I open the crafting menus (and fans speed goes up to compensate). This has me more concerned, although I've not been able to test the card with another game to see if this is more Skyrim related than GPU related.

[ziitch]

Unfortunately AMD's drivers are known for being very wonky lately compared to Nvidia's drivers. Nvidia cards may cost more but you get stable support at the cost of some overclocking ability. You might want to check out a 660 Ti (or any Ti board for that matter), or a 670 for your needs. I for one have a 580 and it handles Skyrim fantastically, in fact IIRC it was around 76-78ºC for me in most intensive places when I last played

But the artifacting might not be the card. It could be the motherboard's integrated graphics that's going bad - I believe that one of the features of Nvidia's i7## chipset was to assist with some of the GPU load in sort of pseudo-SLI fashion.

[ripple]

AMD drivers are poopy.

But I knew that before I got the GPU so I can't really complain. I've always been an avid user of nvidia GPU's and but felt the quality of their driver support was declining in recent years, and thought I'd try AMD. I am not -too- dissappointed with this card. I just ran some short benchmark and stress tests with MSI Kombuster and it is a very cool card, much cooler than all the previous nvidia GPU's I've owned. I don't think the temperature ever went above 66 degrees celcius. I can see why XFX was such a popular brand with OCers before they got rid of the 'x2 warranty.'

I don't think my mobo has an intergrated GPU though. At least I don't see a VGA or DVI outlet on the mobo. Are you sure the i7xx series have integrated GPU's? The manufacturer for my GPU is EVGA, maybe they skimped on that?

Any recommendation for other GPU stress test utilities?

Edited by ripple, 27 January 2013 - 05:02 AM.

[ziitch]

Yeah, most motherboards do. That's what the 750i is for the most part; in fact you have almost the same board as I did before the upgrade, aside from the additional PCI-e x16 slot and having the 780i. (here's the product page to see what it's meant for.) Unfortunately, you can't disable the chip in the BIOS to see if that's the case.

[kalikka]

I really dont understand what kind of problems you guys have with AMD drivers?
I have played everything from HD3D-skyrim to DMC, never had any real problems. Sure some flickering in GW2 menus (and some in skyrim) but I blame my overkill OC and 120hz monitor.

Even when I had problems, the real problem was between the chair and the keyboard.

Edited by kalikka, 28 January 2013 - 05:47 PM.

[ripple]

Well....AMD has not been able to reverse the horrendous reputation of ATI drivers that it inherited (which indisputably 'sucked'). While I can cut and paste some reputable scientific information from the many 'why AMD driver suck!!11!' pages I've found through Google, I'll supply some entirely subjective and anecdotal 'evidence' instead.

- the CCC is inferior to the Nvidia control panel. It has as many functionality as toothpaste.
- I've had 2 BSOD 'attempt to reset driver timed out failed' in the last 2 days. Funny thing is that it never happens during my stress benchmark tests when my GPU is actually being stressed.
- seeing some very infrequent strange 'split second artifacting lines' in Skyrim and have no idea why.
- I've owned 5+ nvidia GPU's and never had these problems.

In fairness, some pros:
- even if catalyst drivers suck, my AMD GPU still run much cooler than nvidia GPU.
- there are many uses for toothpaste.

Edited by ripple, 29 January 2013 - 02:58 AM.

[FMod]

That's much worse than normal. I've had a few ATI cards over the years, from early ones to relatively recent (6850), on primary and secondary PCs, and the worst glitches were things like advanced settings in a specific game not restoring after alt-tab.

I assume it's not a clean OS. Have you properly removed old drivers first (complete uninstall without a new driver)? For how many months/years has the OS been used?

[ripple]

Get this....

Someone suggested downgrading to an older version of catalyst, so I did. Uninstalled/driver sweeper 13.1 then installed 12.11 beta.

So the weird infrequent artifacting I've been seeing in Skyrim is gone. Not encountered any BSOD since. But Skyrim is now a bit unstable....my system just locked up while I was transitioning cells, forcing a hard reboot.

Catalyst is driving me nuts.

Edited by ripple, 30 January 2013 - 04:32 AM.