WARNING: Catalyst 3.8's Overheating Radeon 9800's

[Buliwyf]

http://short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4820

and a big thread here too

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33716666


nothing official from ATi as of yet, but they are in testing sources say in their labs to prove or throw away this theory

[shockwave203]

dont worry about it if you don't overclock your card. the temperature increase is safe if you are running stock.

http://rage3d.com/#1066346626

errr....I'm still gonna advise caution. Yes I was using the beta Omega's, and yes, my card HAD been overclocked. But it was running stock when it fried, and the next night my BRAND NEW 9800pro freaked out too. It's been fine so far on the OEM 3.8's, and I've noticed no temp problems, but I have nothing to baseline it with (I've only run the 9800 with the 3.8s). I'll be sure to pass on anything i encounter.

[Ryan]

Could this have explained the problems I had with my friend 9800 pro while playing BF? Overheating? Makes me skeptical.

Anywho, i advise all to degrade!

I haven't had any problems at all, but I've never overclocked myself.(what's the point of possible harming the card for 3 to 5 more fps?!?)

If the burnouts turn out to be true, I'm wondering if this has something to do with ATI's supposed new tech OVERDRIVE. When it's enabled, it overclocks the card on the fly depending on what the core temp of the cards chip is at.

Overdrive is ONLY possible on the XT series (9800/9600), b/c it actually relies on the new PCB's the boards are made on. It is possible, however, that the drivers are buggy as a result of this. They also implemented a new feature called VPU recover, which may be responsible as well.

Ps. I got ALOT more than 3-5FPS outta my overclock!

[shockwave203]

me too. i get really BIG performance increases when I play BF with AA and AF enabled. I can play at 1280 X 1024 with 4X AA and AF and still stay around 70 the entire time with my card overclocked

To clarify, I meant on my machine, a 3.2 ghz pentium with 2 gigs of ram. The machine's already squeezing every last bit of performance out of my AIW Radeon 9700 pro, overclocking to the maximum amount would only give me marginal improvements.

Of course, on lower machines you can get a large boost from OC'ing.

[MoDyna]

Thanks for the update Buli, I have a 9800 Pro and I never moved from the 3.5 V to the 3.7 V driver when it came out. Did not seem to be much need. But I am certainly not going to install the 3.8 V until I hear some better news.

[shockwave203]

Turns out it's probably just a rumour. ATI can't reproduce the problem (if they could, they would release a statement to NOT use the drivers, because they would be flooded with RMA's) and someone tested the temps of his 9800 using different drivers in 3dmark and found no change in temp

http://rage3d.com/#1066564288

FYI for all us ATI owners.....I've just read through the entire sticky at the top of the rage3d forum, under driver discussion, and the consensous seems to be this:

1. the temps are slightly increased, but nothing major.
-personally, with my new 9800pro, I've not seen a major increase over what my 9700pro ran while overclocked to similar speeds as a 9800pro while running the 3.7s

2. Monitor death seems to be attributed to the drivers trying to rapidly use a series of refresh rates that are unsupported by the monitor. The suggestions to alleviate this are to disabled the secondary display if you aren't using it, to install the .inf for your specific monitor (and not to leave it as plug and play) for BOTH the primary and secondary displays, and to check the box in the adv. tab that says "HIDE MODES THIS MONITOR DOESN'T SUPPORT"
- I already had all this done, and haven't noticed any major flickering, save for a few instances during map changes, etc.

Just wanted to pass that along