ATI HD5xxx series, EPIC FAIL series. Post your problems here! Will ATI do NOTHING?

Allright so I thought to make this thread for the reason that MANY MANY people are having hard times to get their ATI product to work.
Nobody from ATI seems to care, or for the matter of fact I even think that they themselves dont know what problems their cards are having and ALL BECAUSE OF ATI DRIVERS!
I myself bought a HD5970 wich worked fine with my old windows for a few hours, then took out my other harddrive to install a benchmarking Windows on it.
When Windows was installed all was perfect, when I installed the drivers, immidietly I noticed ARTIFACTS on the screen, I mean I havent seen artifacts on new cards from the 9800 series that ATI had. Thats a long time! I just could not figure out what was the friggin problem,

I was astonished when I typed into google "5970 Artifacts".. tons of people having this problem with NEW cards, even some sending them to RMA to get a new card in return wich also artifacted, now that did not make any sense at all.

Finally after searching for hours on end through many forums I stumbled upon a FIX!
The problem that ATI 5xxx series hanged, artifacted, gsod etc was that the 2D Clocks of the cards went too low! 156MHz core and 300MHz memory.
ATI seemed to fix this with a driver update but did not touch the memory clocks!
I then went to DOS and flashed my new card with higher 2D clocks for the GPU, 300MHz. When I got to windows, all was fine but when I opened up program like MSI Afterburner, heeey ARTIFACTS!
I then researched some more and got to the conclusion that the MEMORY needs to be raised as well! Some raised it to 1000MHz but all that is needed is 400MHz 2D!
So, again opened up Radeon BIOS Editor, changed the clocks and reboot. And it works! No artifacts anymore ever!

Flash program: http://www.techpowerup.com/rbe/
When in DOS type:

atiflash -p -f 0 masterbios.bin
atiflash -p -f 1 slavebios.bin

The card has a master and a slave bios! So dont flash a master bios on the slave card or vice versa!

I did notice that my original BIOS that had manual fan control option in it still artifacted though!!! I had to download a older BIOS for the card that didnt have the manual fan control in it and guess what, the card works as it should now! BUT!! hahaa, there is still a but!

ATI was so kind that it thought, HEY lets implemend ULPS in our drivers! This would cause all info programs like CPU-Z, GPU-Z, Everest.. etc whatever the program was that read videocard information to HANG the whole PC! BUT ITS WORTH IT It is so good that we dont care that some tiny program like CPU-Z or GPU-Z hangs, nobody uses them right?!?! They are for overclockers anyway and tahts voiding the warranty so lets do this EPIC change!!

What ULPS is, it is a new feature in the Catalyst Drivers, its a power-saving feature and it completley shuts down any non-primary GPU-s in Crossfire mode! It works when the card is not in 3D mode, that means in windows. So when the non-primary GPU is shut down and you open a program like the new CPU-Z that has GRAPHICS info in it, it starts to want to read the info from the non-primary card also, what that does is INSTANT HANG of the whole PC! Only way to resume work is by resetting your PC!

This was the whole text that I found from the Everest forum:

So, what to say? Well if this is not fixed before the GTX480 is out, I will sell this card and NEVER EVER am I buying ATI again, NEVER! I dont care if its 50% faster, the driver fuzz behind ATI is more than horrible, its like.... how do I say it...


I FEEL LIKE I BOUGHT A TOYOTA!

 

I've not had any problems with either 5770 and 5850.

 

I had no problems with my HD5850 and HD5750 btw. The big problems start with 5870 and 5970.

 

Some people don't understand the "I'm never buying X company's product again" thing. ULPS is a pain in the ass for me too...Until I disabled it by changing one registry entry, so that's not relevant even a little. Further, it's not an issue with the driver, its a conflict with a third party program. Responsibility of the third party to implement support.

As for the GSOD crashes, yeah, those suck, should be fixed, but I can see you already did that. So you're not going to buy any more ATI again, ever, unless ATI fixes the issue that you already fixed? Come on man, it's PC hardware, Nvidia has problems too man, so does Creative, so does Asus, so does everyone. When you buy enthusiast products on or near release? You're asking for trouble shooting. Is it right? Not for me to decide, some of us enjoy it, but it IS the name of the game.

 

Is this another flamer or is this really true?

 

no probs here with my 5850 only 3 grey screen crashes since i got it and one of those was directly after installing a new fix lol, of the other 2 one was when overclocking, so 1 true one if you ask me and 1 with shoddy drivers.

All companies have problems with new cards on release, its nothing new and wont be either.

 

No disrespect to you(to each their own) but some people like myself have never had a prob with ATI.
With even mass production hardware there will be some bad batch,its expected and that's why there are RMA and warranty.
As for software I've seen where ppl complain about drivers not working with a 5-10 year old game and acting as if every driver release should add a 5fps increase to one specific game.
As i said before,no disrespect to anyone but some of the batching Nvidia and ATI gets are not necessary and are cause by users.

 

I've not had any problems with my 5970 since 10.1 maybe 10.2. Before that I would get gray screens if I didnt not disbable powrplay and ulps.

 

All my problems (5850) seem to be driver related, 10.3 preview was horrible, but the older 8.703's (one of the 10.2 betas) worked excellently.

Haven't noticed any other unusual problems.

 

Well I had a couple of issues with powerplay like you but they seem to be fixed in the newer drivers. The last 2 driver releases have been of good quality and performance.

It would be a shame to get rid of your ATI card just as the problems are fixed only to go through 6 months of problems with the new Nvidia cards .

We don't know much about fermi stability yet it might perform 100% out of the box but personally I expect driver issues because it is new architecture.

 

Uhh ok?

I have a 5870 and it's great.

I've yet to have any serious issues with the hardware or drivers.

I'm seriously thinking people have unstable systems to begin with.

 

i doubt that. i had my 5870 since launch and hadn't had an issue yet with it. still working like a beast

 

Just sold 2x XFX HD 5770, had no issues other than GSOD with 9.12 HF while trying to overclocking the cards beyond it's limits. Now got a 5970 XFX Black edition and just needed to update card bios to gain fan control, besides that it's working fine and overclocking well.

 

Sort your buggy unstable rig out, and stop blaming ATI for it.

 

I have had issue's (check my resent postings), but it is my fault. I have had two 3870 x2, two 4870 x2, now I have two 5770, it is sometime a hassle with drivers but that is it(usually I didn't delete the extras in side the windows system 32 folder) witch has been my issue NOT AN ATI ISSUE!

No disrespect either but artifact is not caused by drivers, you bought a $700 video card that has V-REG over heating issue, If you googled how to fix it you would see every body is water cooling these cards. So yeah if you don't know about that issue and keep the factory fan on silent, I could see you burning up the V- REGS VERY EASILY! For $700 bucks you should do some home work next time!


update on the issue "I did have with my 42" display" not working, seems windows 7 has not certified many display companies so the EDID and resolution issue will be happening to some people. If anybody needs to read up no this feel free here's a link for you. There is also a work around to force your monitors refresh rate higher.
EVGA X58 758 Intel Z3520 Dominator/1600 ATI/2X/5770/CF 4/WD/160g/Raid0 Enermax Galaxy

 

These cards are awesome! I still get annoyed by the fan every once in a while.. Nothing to complain about here though.. I love the 5870 / 5850 / 5770
oh and 5970 as well. I like that one! great cards! Good job ATI!

 

lol, i mean just lol. Ive been working with computers over 15years, I know what im doing, my setup is completely stable, these problems I told happened even if I loaded defaults from bios. All those problems are driver problems but ATI will do nothing to fix them.

 

Bodar what did you do about the V-reg over heating problem, just crank up the fan to 100%? Or you got water blocks?

I think you need to buy more cards:nerd:!

 

ok just because you worked on, with computers 15 years means nothing. Some people are president and look at that. HEHE .. smile..

1st dont blame ATI/AMD. Well did you buy your card right from ATI? Didnt think so. I have a 5870 and works flawless. If it had problems I would blame Sapphire! And if you really have been around .. you KNOW all cards are NOT made the same. Would LOOK like it but are not.

ATI Nvidia all have there problems. Google ANY of them. You will come up with ..your words "TONS" of people.

 

you also need to take the "windows" factor into account, I amazed anything can run on this mess lol.