4870x2

[Franatium]

Got mine yesterday. Coming from a single 4850 I was thinking since my lowly 4850 can run most anything at 1600x1200 with 4x/8xAA at good framerates the 4870X2 with twice the cores and 4 times as much much faster memory it would be no problem and from all the previews and reviews in the last couple months it seemed almost certain that crossfire would work and work well. It turns out things were not quite so simple.

Firstly I had fun trying to plug it in, managed to destroy a SATA connector while trying to get the card in place. Though I blame that more on my cramped case the poor layout of the P5K-E which has half the SATA ports obscured with any large graphics card installed. Then stupidly I plugged the power cable in the wrong way around so the 6 pin end into the power supply and the 8 pin end into the card and was greeted by a nice error message on boot saying "I don't have enough power, plug me in properly fool". So after I got the right cable things started looking up, I managed POST but lost my OC for some reason.
Then in windows I had the usual sillyness that accompanies installing a new graphics card with the low resolutions and what not. So after a driver reinstall and a reboot I thought
"right my NZ$950 may actually prove itself well spent now"
I was wrong.
I was greeted instead with a lot of strange corruptions and games deciding to crash.
So after reinstalling again things started to work a little better, I managed 73k in 3dmark03 and 16,500ish in 3dmark06 with only a 3.2Ghz Q6700.
It was not all peachy on the gaming front, though FEAR ran nicely averaging 160FPS at 1600x1200 with 4xAA, GRID which I have been playing a lot lately and had previously been running nicely at 70+FPS at 1600x1200 with 4xAA on my 4850 decided it didn't like the whole idea of crossfire and that it would only run at 20-40 FPS no matter what I set the resolution to and that wasn't your usual semi-playable 20-40 FPS this was horrible-microstuttering-feels-like-10FPS. COD4, TF2 and UT3 on the other hand seemed to work fine.

So after much more hassle than I had been expecting I have managed to get my shiny new 4870X2 working somewhere near the way it should do. Still don't know whats going on with GRID though.

What has everyone else's experience been like?

[Afrodisiac]

Send me one and I'll gladly test it for ya!

[Franatium]

Ask streakybacon, he's got 3 coming today or tomorrow.

[MeltDown]

Originally Posted by Franatium

Ask streakybacon, he's got 3 coming today or tomorrow.

Why? 1 for him and 2 for me?

[Clue69Less]

I'd be tempted to do a clean OS install just to be sure there are no driver issues.

[Franatium]

Him and Kattex and another friend are buying theirs all in the same order for some reason. So at some point in the near future the bacon man is going to have a small stack of 4870X2s arriving at his house. Only 1 of which will actually be his though.

[StreakyBacon]

They didn't come today

Tomorrow hopefully.

[Franatium]

Originally Posted by Clue69Less

I'd be tempted to do a clean OS install just to be sure there are no driver issues.

I'll probably play around with different driver versions for a couple weeks till I can buy a new hard drive and a copy of vista 64bit

[baligavinod]

Originally Posted by StreakyBacon

They didn't come today

Tomorrow hopefully.

*ponits and laughs *

Anyways, I agree with clue on this. Thats what I did when when i recently upgraded to 4850.

[StreakyBacon]

I really hope I don't get too many problems. I would like to run a couple CF 4870x2 benches before heading off to work.

[tool_462]

I'd uninstall the old drivers and run Driver Cleaner Pro a couple times, reboot and run it again, reboot and install.

Could just be premature drivers that still have some issues though.

[Tark]

All I have to say is I told ya all so, same bs crap happened on 3870x2 when it first came out.. drivers fix some issues over time, but these dual GPU cards suck. Don't use dual monitors EVER its a known issue with the drivers and will BSOD you daily as it does to me and many others that refuse to stop using dual monitors...

[Eurasianman]

Originally Posted by Tark

All I have to say is I told ya all so, same bs crap happened on 3870x2 when it first came out.. drivers fix some issues over time, but these dual GPU cards suck. Don't use dual monitors EVER its a known issue with the drivers and will BSOD you daily as it does to me and many others that refuse to stop using dual monitors...

Quit your whining and go buy a 30" WS display

My 24" WS display seems to be better than two 19" displays

[MeltDown]

Actually, and as many of you know I'm not a huge nVidia fan in general, the 9800GX2 experience (barring quad-SLI) has been fine. I guess if you have to choose nVidia's hackjob packaging but functional drivers (which took a while, the ones that came with the card were BSOD magnets) look more appealing.

[Clue69Less]

Originally Posted by Tark

All I have to say is I told ya all so, same bs crap happened on 3870x2 when it first came out.. drivers fix some issues over time, but these dual GPU cards suck. Don't use dual monitors EVER its a known issue with the drivers and will BSOD you daily as it does to me and many others that refuse to stop using dual monitors...

I'm have not had any probs running dual monitors on my 3870x2. I do not run that box 24/7, just when I need it on. Does your BSOD occur randomly?

[Tark]

Originally Posted by Clue69Less

I'm have not had any probs running dual monitors on my 3870x2. I do not run that box 24/7, just when I need it on. Does your BSOD occur randomly?

yup, completely random, usually wont happen until many hours after booting though, sometimes its days btwn, sometimes twice a day, makes it very hard to test

[Eurasianman]

I say the problem lies BCAK

[Tark]