ATTN 4870x2 Owners: Post your 4870x2 pics/benches...Pros and Cons

B

BigCactus

Gawd
Joined
Jul 2, 2008
Messages
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Pics:

x2three.jpg


x2one.jpg


x2two.jpg


Pros:

It's huge, but it looks small in the rocketfish :cool:.

Grid runs very smooth and looks stunning at 8xmsaa 1920x1200 with everything maxed. Definite wow factor here.

Adjusting the fan speed manually to 45% via the profile gets idle temp down to a nice 44-49c, and in game temps improve drastically to about 75-79c after hours of play.

Free prince of persia game - been looking to play a good 2d game actually :)

Visontek Lifetime Warranty

Black PCB and nice plain black sticker. Woot :eek:

Cons:

Official 8.8 drivers seem buggy to me. 8.8 beta drivers run better on my system, but cod4 feels choppy, not smooth like Grid.

Temps run too hot for my taste on auto mode...though even when it gets to 86-89c I don't see artifacting.

I had compatibility issues with my ix38 quad GT motherboard, had to go back to an older bios to resolve the "no display issue" found on many x38/x48 motherboards. I think drivers need some serious work...at least for vista 64.

There is not a lot of overhead to OC this thing on Air, that's for sure. This of course was to be expected with this card.

6 to 8 pin adapter was not included. :mad:

In summary ATI needs to get on the ball with the drivers and the compatibility problems to make this card a knockout. Right now I couldn't recommend this card to the average Joe until ATI works out the kinks. It's quite apparent that some games run amazing, and some games not so amazing. That's just from my personal experience thus far. My board is a bit on the "shakey" side since I had to revert back to an older bios...but I think drivers just need a lot more work.
 
Happiest purchase since I upgraded to an 8800gts from a 6800 card. I used to own a 3870x2 and believe me AMD/ATI has improved their dual gpu solution by leaps and bounds. Haven't seen any erratic framerates that I used to get on Crysis. AA is pretty much free on 1920x1080, very high, and averaging 40fps. Haven't played with any CFG files yet.
Only played warhammer and Crysis so far will load up Mass Effect, Supreme Commander, Bioshock, TF2 later this weekend.

Here it is sitting in its very own Ghetto Custom upside down Antec Sonata while it awaits its new case next week. (btw I now know how Antec came up with the p180/182 designs:)

f_IMG0391m_5b5d1bb.jpg
 
I've got an HiS Radeon 4870 X2. For the record it looks identical to yours. I haven't had any problems with mine though I've only tried it in Age of Conan and Unreal Tournament III. In both games it beats the Geforce GTX 280 hands down. Yeah the thing gets quite hot, but that's a given for any high end graphics card. I'm using Catalyst 8.7 drivers right now. I couldn't get the 8.8 drivers to install correctly so I gave up on them.

I'd also like to say that your build looks amazing. Your wiring job is excellent and the build is asthetically pleasing. It's so clean and I especially like the sleeving you've used there. Very nice work.
 
Official 8.8 drivers seem buggy to me. 8.8 beta drivers run better on my system, but cod4 feels choppy, not smooth like Grid.

Temps run too hot for my taste on auto mode...though even when it gets to 86-89c I don't see artifacting.

I had compatibility issues with my ix38 quad GT motherboard, had to go back to an older bios to resolve the "no display issue" found on many x38/x48 motherboards. I think drivers need some serious work...at least for vista 64.

There is not a lot of overhead to OC this thing on Air, that's for sure. This of course was to be expected with this card.

6 to 8 pin adapter was not included.
Click to expand...

1) the beta 8.8 drivers didn't even work for me, the release ones do
2)turn up the fan
3)nothing like that for me
4)turn up the fan
5)buy a new power supply

Not trying to argue, just saying
 
kadozer said:
Happiest purchase since I upgraded to an 8800gts from a 6800 card. I used to own a 3870x2 and believe me AMD/ATI has improved their dual gpu solution by leaps and bounds. Haven't seen any erratic framerates that I used to get on Crysis. AA is pretty much free on 1920x1080, very high, and averaging 40fps. Haven't played with any CFG files yet.
Only played warhammer and Crysis so far will load up Mass Effect, Supreme Commander, Bioshock, TF2 later this weekend.

Here it is sitting in its very own Ghetto Custom upside down Antec Sonata while it awaits its new case next week. (btw I now know how Antec came up with the p180/182 designs:)

f_IMG0391m_5b5d1bb.jpg
Click to expand...

Nice HD mounting system there.

I don't really get all the complaints about the 8 pins, it was pretty much common knowledge since early 2007 that future high end cards will use 8 pins and I specifically searched for a PSU with two pairs of 6 & 8 when I was preparing my rig.
 
imgp3347ty8.jpg


only con i know of is the heating of a room over a couple hours of gaming

the 8.8 work fine for me
the deafult fan profile works fine for me
 
Oh just to add, I fired up Call of Duty 4 and I'm not impressed. While the visuals are as good as ever, the game just feels choppy. On all my NVIDIA configurations going back to my 8800GTX SLI configuration Call of Duty 4 has always felt smooth. The 9800GX2 setup didn't do 4xAA for shit but at 2xAA it was smooth. 3-Way SLI'ed 8800GTX's were smooth as butter. FRAPS tells me everything is fine but I can tell it's not. Call of Duty 4 just isn't smooth on the 4870 X2.

So Age of Conan flat out runs better on my 4870 X2 than it ever did on my Geforce GTX 280 SLI setup. Unreal Tournament III is better on the 4870 X2 than it is on a single Geforce GTX 280.

That's all I've tried thus far.
 
running COD 4x (12 edge detect) 1920x1200 max everything seems fluid to me
 
CanadaOwnsJoo said:
only con i know of is the heating of a room over a couple hours of gaming

the 8.8 work fine for me
the deafult fan profile works fine for me
Click to expand...

That's crazy, always nice to see your rig. I've isolated my high temp issues to inadequate air flow to my case. My temps drop dramatically once I take the side panels off. I'll be adding more intake fans pretty soon.
 
Just 1 screen while I was messing around in Crysis:
1007684.bmp


My mounting system pwns..no tools needed and accessible.
 
Dan_D said:
Oh just to add, I fired up Call of Duty 4 and I'm not impressed. While the visuals are as good as ever, the game just feels choppy. On all my NVIDIA configurations going back to my 8800GTX SLI configuration Call of Duty 4 has always felt smooth. The 9800GX2 setup didn't do 4xAA for shit but at 2xAA it was smooth. 3-Way SLI'ed 8800GTX's were smooth as butter. FRAPS tells me everything is fine but I can tell it's not. Call of Duty 4 just isn't smooth on the 4870 X2.

So Age of Conan flat out runs better on my 4870 X2 than it ever did on my Geforce GTX 280 SLI setup. Unreal Tournament III is better on the 4870 X2 than it is on a single Geforce GTX 280.

That's all I've tried thus far.
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Yup, good to know that it's not just me as far as cod4 goes. I'd like to assume it's drivers...as I would think AOC is a more demanding game...and honestly a single 4870 seemed to be a lot smoother in cod4. I do not have AOC or Unreal, so can't comment on those.
 
Hey could someone run crysis at 640x480 with everything on low and tell me the fps. I got 7fps at those settings on my laptops ati xpress 200m until the cpu overheated.
 
CanadaOwnsJoo said:
running COD 4x (12 edge detect) 1920x1200 max everything seems fluid to me
Click to expand...

I'm new to ati so do u just set AA to edge detect in ccc and check "use application settings" (does it let the game set it?) or do I set it hard ware wise?

And what's the difference between all the AA types?
 
Well I ended up with a new problem. In Age of Conan the damn game turns into a slide show every so often. The temperature is about 88c for the GPU according to the Catalyst Control Center. That shouldn't be the thermal threshold for the GPUs to slow down.

I'll be in an area that runs great and all of the sudden it will just start running like shit. I mean 1-2FPS type of shit. Totally unplayable. Weird thing is last night I didn't have any problems with Age of Conan. So far UT3 is the only game working right. Age of Conan runs like shit for no reason at all and Call of Duty 4 isn't smooth. WTF? I had hoped ATI got their act together with their drivers but while the CCC is world's better than it used to be the drivers are still shit overall from what I can tell.

I'm on a fresh install of Windows so I know I don't have NVIDIA drivers floating around in the system. PSU is good, everything else is good. Temps seem ok. Not sure what's going on other than the drivers are just likely sucking.
 
Dan_D said:
Well I ended up with a new problem. In Age of Conan the damn game turns into a slide show every so often. The temperature is about 88c for the GPU according to the Catalyst Control Center. That shouldn't be the thermal threshold for the GPUs to slow down.

I'll be in an area that runs great and all of the sudden it will just start running like shit. I mean 1-2FPS type of shit. Totally unplayable. Weird thing is last night I didn't have any problems with Age of Conan. So far UT3 is the only game working right. Age of Conan runs like shit for no reason at all and Call of Duty 4 isn't smooth. WTF? I had hoped ATI got their act together with their drivers but while the CCC is world's better than it used to be the drivers are still shit overall from what I can tell.

I'm on a fresh install of Windows so I know I don't have NVIDIA drivers floating around in the system. PSU is good, everything else is good. Temps seem ok. Not sure what's going on other than the drivers are just likely sucking.
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Check your temps with GPU-Z. I assume "GPU Memio" is memory temperature? If your's is anything like mine, it will run at about 15*C hotter than the core. I wonder if that might have something to do with it? There's always the easy elimination of blasting the fan at 100% and seeing if the problem persists, if it does then heat isn't an issue.
 
I really don't like that thin back plate on the opposite side to cool the memory....I don't see that as being effective. I'm thinking about taking that off and putting some ram sinks on it and see what happens :D. Right now I blame the drivers. ATI really needs to get these issues resolved. I wonder if people using vista 32-bit are having better success than vista 64-bit users with these drivers.
 
Dethred said:
Check your temps with GPU-Z. I assume "GPU Memio" is memory temperature? If your's is anything like mine, it will run at about 15*C hotter than the core. I wonder if that might have something to do with it? There's always the easy elimination of blasting the fan at 100% and seeing if the problem persists, if it does then heat isn't an issue.
Click to expand...

I'll do that later. I did solve my Age of Conan issue. I had 4xAA and 16xAF forced through the control panel for playing UT3 yesterday since UT doesn't have those settings. I had turned them off for Age of Conan today and I had issues. I forced AA and AF in the control panel and now Age of Conan runs silky smooth. :confused:
 
I'm having issues as well. Temps peak in the low to mid 80's. Oblivion is crashing. Sometimes the GPU idles at 80 sometimes its in the 60's. Sometimes the fan revs up during 3d gaming, sometimes it doesn't.

Grid and Oblivion show a very minor flicker in some parts of the screen at times, mainly in the sky areas of both games.

I am smelling a major bust with this card.

Do you guys think the hardware is even stable?
 
1erCru said:
I'm having issues as well. Temps peak in the low to mid 80's. Oblivion is crashing. Sometimes the GPU idles at 80 sometimes its in the 60's. Sometimes the fan revs up during 3d gaming, sometimes it doesn't.

Grid and Oblivion show a very minor flicker in some parts of the screen at times, mainly in the sky areas of both games.

I am smelling a major bust with this card.

Do you guys think the hardware is even stable?
Click to expand...

high 80's is normal in game
high idle temps could me poor ventilation mine idle at 68-72 on the hotter core
the fan will rev up around 85 deg to the next step then again at 88 degrees
 
I regooped my card and now I'm seeing idle temps at 67-69c even the the case doors closed. I have found that this card likes a lot of goop. I was pretty liberal applying ceramique. I also lightly lapped each of the copper bases that makes contact with the gpus with 1000 grit sandpaper. Who knows, I think it may of helped :)

Also I don't notice a performance hit in cod4 when forcing 16xaa and 16xaf...I think that's odd, though the game still feels a bit choppy. Something is up, wake up driver team.

I ran 3dmark06 just for fun, and to get an idea if crossfire was indeed working:
http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=7901232&compareResultType=14
It's definitely working. I don't have vantage, and am not willing to pay for it :cool:
 
So far, however, the card has given me some problems and I suppose I expected a little more performance out of it, coming from a 9800gtx.


What kind of fps are you guys seeing for Crysis?

I run the timed demo on very high, 64bit and I am getting 17-18 fps after 3 runs on that island map. Does this sound low? I'm on a [email protected] and 4gb ram
 
Those of you experiencing issues should post what drivers your using. It would be nice to know if it's a specific set or all of them across the board.
 
if I leave the fan speed at default my card hits 99C when gaming (still worked though with no crashes/slows downs) if I manually change the fan to 70 percent range it never gets above 70-75. I am going to repply thermal paste today and see if that helps.
 
Here is a video I captured uploaded on YouTube:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=8KFV4sfnras

I can only get 20-25 FPS on Crysis with the hacked cfg file everything on "Very High" under XP x64 with the AA up to 8x only. Which is still playable but I wish I could get more. Haven't experienced any issues with my 4870x2 since I updated by BIOS.
 
sounds good John, glad the bios updated fixed your previous issues.

keep in mind that Crysis typically runs "better" on nvidia gpus...I know that playing @ 1920x1200 on my old 280, w/everything on high no AA or AF and it was getting around 20-30 fps as well (this was right @ the beginning too)
 
yang88she said:
sounds good John, glad the bios updated fixed your previous issues.

keep in mind that Crysis typically runs "better" on nvidia gpus...I know that playing @ 1920x1200 on my old 280, w/everything on high no AA or AF and it was getting around 20-30 fps as well (this was right @ the beginning too)
Click to expand...

Crysis ran damned good on my system running with dual Geforce GTX 280's in SLI. I haven't bothered to play on my single 4870 X2 because I know I'll be dissappointed in it.
 
Dan_D said:
Crysis ran damned good on my system running with dual Geforce GTX 280's in SLI. I haven't bothered to play on my single 4870 X2 because I know I'll be dissappointed in it.
Click to expand...

haha, now you're making me hesitate to play as well!

I just don't want to be let down either...:(
 
yang88she said:
haha, now you're making me hesitate to play as well!

I just don't want to be let down either...:(
Click to expand...

If I had two 4870 X2's in CrossfireX I wouldn't be so hesitant to fire it up. I know with one card I've backtracked performance wise in that game.
 
Who cares about Crysis? After dealing with that crappy game last night I've realized its simply a marketing tool, designed to work best with Nvidia products because Nvidia payed Crytek for sponsorship. Apparently it has worked, because you see people buying SLI setups just to get a better Crysis experience. My 4870X2 DOMINATES every other game, so therefore Crysis is worthless.

What does 40 FPS get you in Crysis? Smoother views of stupid AI running into walls? If I want to look at a pretty scene, I'll look at a picture or go on vacation for my $1300 it'd cost for a Tri-SLI setup.
 
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