New card help - faulty?

turbot

OK - so I just got a new Dell 9150 with an 512meg X1900XTX card.

It's supposed to be one of the fastest on the market, so I was looking forward to what it could do.

So this is what I've done:

I ran 3dMark06, and it got a score of 5600.

Next, I installed BF2, and while it was playing, I noticed loads of artifacts / polygons / fuzz. These are symptoms of what I've heard people describe as being from overclocked cards, except my card is not overclocked.

So then I downloaded the latest drivers from ATI, I think they are Catalyst 6.7 and installed them. When I loaded them, it referred to the card as ATI X1900 Series, with the default VPU speed being 500mhz, and the memory being 600mhz.

This I don't understand, as I thought this cards default VPU speed was 675Mhz, with a memory speed of 1.5ghz... So I used the ATI driver to adjust the settings to X1900XTX speeds, and now the machine has crashed over and over again. IT crashed while running 3d mark. And then it crashed starting up BF2.

So - it's only a day old. What do you reckon - is the graphics card faulty?

Your advice is appreciated.

mathias

Either its faulty or youve been given a lesser model than you ordered and the overclock is making it unstable , thats most likely whats happened ,
Give Dell a call , one way or the other you have an issue with them !!

8T8

Whats being reported are the 2D clock speeds [500/595].

The card has two modes 2D & 3D [650/750x2] the 2D clocks are lower so the fan doesn't have to spin as fast hence lower noise output. When you run a 3D application it kicks in the 3D clocks mode.

Various utilities do not properly report the difference between the 2D & 3D clocks with ATI cards so there is nothing wrong on that front.

As for the X1900 VPU, ATI supply cards to Dell at there request so they may not have the full retail name unless when using the Dell branded drivers (stupid I know) but it doesn't make any difference it is still an X1900XTX.

If you got no visual corruption in 3Dmark I would say the problem with BF2 was just a driver issue, do test other games and see how things come out.

In particular OpenGL games like Doom 3, Quake 4 & Prey are very sensitive to damaged cards and if there is a hardware issue they tend to show visual corruption.

Just to say again there's nothing wrong with you're clock speeds, don't overclock it.


If you want to you can verify that it is running at the correct clock speeds in 3D mode by using a graph monitoring application that records the clock speeds (some overlay a real time clock speed but that doesn't work I'm told), I don't have an ATI X1K card on hand to test but it was one of these three ATI Tray Tools, ATI-Tool (get the beta version at the bottom) or RivaTuner I believe RivaTuner will report the 3D speeds set in the bios which is proof enough without going to the trouble of recording a clock speed graph. Within RivaTuner under 'Target Adaptor' click on 'customize' then click on the hardware report icon the one with the blue/white I. In here look for ATI VGA bios information at the top list and click it then close the report window and open it again and it should display all clock speeds set in the bios of the card at the bottom of the report.

K.O.Kiki

Have you tried testing 3DMark06 at the default speeds?
Tell us what you get.

Anti

5600 in 3dmark06 isnt too bad. its a bit disapointing alright.
Whats the rest of the pc spec ?

turbot

OK the rest of the kits spec is as follows:

Pentium D 940 Dual Core 3.2mhz
2gb DDR2 533 RAM
2 x SATA 250gb drives in RAID 0 configuration
Soundblaster X-fi Music Xtreme
DVDRW 16x
ATI X1900XTX 512 megs card
in a Dell 9150.

The 3dMark06 score was 5625

Any suggestions are welcomed.
I'm still getting some artifacts on Battlefield, and also on the demo for X3 - The Return (which otherwise looks great).

Anti

You have the latest drivers ? if so maybe use a slightly older set of drivers. If you still get artifacts then open up the case, and get a desk fan to blow air into the case while you run a benchmark or play a game. As it sounds like a overheating problem. If this stops the artifacts contact dell and get them to take back the pc and install a new card for you.

8T8

You know one possible scenario is Dell put a crappy PSU in the system combine the power hungry X1900XTX and a guzzler like Pentium D 940 3.2Ghz it could be the PSU cannot properly drive the graphics card hence the visual corruption.

Do you have a spare PSU or one you could borrow of someone, what you could do is disconnect the system PSU from the graphics card and plug the spare PSU into the X1900XTX to power that on it's own and see if anything changes.

TerrorFirmer

I was just about to ask the same thing....

AnCapaillMor

If it was the PSU and BF2, it would crash to desktop happened to me a few times when i'd too many things running. As for running at 500MHZ, thats normal, what the X1900XTX does is, it clocks it up to 675 when you're using a 3d rendered program. you can hear the fan pick up speed as your start a game. what i used before i got screwed out of an X1900, was leave the catalyst center open and alt tab out during games and check heat speed etc. To me it looks like your card is screwed.

Anti

seems that way. i had the same problem with 2 9800pros back in the day. i think its best you just give dell a call or email them at this point, as the last thing you want to do is further ddamage the card, and get into a arguement with dell over wether it was broken before or not.