Sapphire 4870 artifacts

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PsichoDM

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 24, 2006
Messages
161
Question: I have a Sapphire 4870 that I purchased last summer that currently seems to cause artifacts in a few games. The artifacting is of the 90% of the screen covered with random polygons and weird shaped textures. The games that do cause artifacts are games such as: Empire Total War, Sacred 2, Supreme Commander. Other games on the other hand haven't been causing any artifacting, games such as Company of Heroes, Call of Duty 4, Mount & Blade.

This is all with the latest ATI drivers that were released on 2/20 I believe. I updated to them from a slightly older version because I noticed that Empire was causing artifacts and I thought it might have been a version related issue. Apparently now.

My temps seem to be under control. The temp rarely goes above 80C because I keep my fans around 35%, but I even tried at 75% when the temp wouldn't go past 65% and the same issue was still present.

I suspect the graphics card might be permanently damaged due to overheating, since for a while I ran it with an open Shuttle XPC case without manually raising the fan speeds. I know ATI say that these cards are meant to survive at even 120C for years, but it seems like it takes less than that. It still doesn't explain why some games are fine.. I'm not exactly an expert, so I was hoping that some of you who might have experienced similar issues might suggest something :)

Thanks!
 
i have the Sapphire 4870 1GB version with custom cooler. the only time i see artifact is when i push the core clock over 810mhz and memory clock over 1100mhz. currently running at 800/1000 with catalyst 9.2 on windows 7 64bit with out problem. i set my fan manuallly @ 50% card idles around 42-43c and doesn't go over 65c durning gaming.
 
You must not have very good cooling. I have the same card and my temps never go above 70c at the same fan speed. Sounds like you're card is about to die though.
 
I forgot to add that my clock is a default 750/900.

I tried lowing it down to something stupid like 550/650 but that didn't solve anything, at least not on the fly.
 
here,
4850 reference => gets up to 85 - 95 celcius
and still working normally.

eventhough sometimes the fan goes broom ( up to 90% speed for a second )

4870 should be thougher than 4850 right ?
 
Well as I was saying, I remember reading somewhere a post by an ATI employee saying that the GPU was meant to be OK even at 120C for several years. Either that's not the case, or damage was done to the card in some other manner.
 
In any case, I "borrowed" a 4850 from Fry's this week to double-check that indeed this problem was being caused by a broken graphics card and not by something else, such as drivers. As predicted, the 4850 has absolutely none of the issues I've been experiencing with the older 4870, no artifacts and CoH actually starts now (this one makes no sense, but I guess it might have been related to the fact that I'm now using the default ati vista drivers as opposed to 9.2).

I'm hoping the Sapphire RMA process doesn't suck as much as everybody's been saying here and I can get my card back on time before the 15 day return policy ;)
 
My SAPPHIRE 100259L started doing this also like a week ago and i didn't know what was going on because it plays great in most other games but need for speed undercover, the car will have no wheels and artifacts everywhere.
Newegg won't take the card back because it has been past 30 days, and sapphire says they want to charge 15.00 because it is past 90 days. What is that all about????
 
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