New ATI graphics card 2

[Nelviticus]

I have always used nVidia cards but recently bought one of ATI's new 4850 cards. It's nice and zippy but my PC has exhibited odd behaviour since I installed it and I'm wondering whether a) this is a common quirk of ATI cards and their drivers, b) it's a quirk of the new 48xx series or c) my card is slightly faulty.

What happens is that the mouse locks up or slows down sometimes and occasionally clicks don't register. It's particularly noticeable when you do something like alt-tab from a game to another app - for a second the mouse won't be able to move. With my nVidia cards this didn't happen.

I bought a new power supply when I bought the card (a Corsair HX620, which is on ATI's approved list for the 4850) so that isn't the problem.

I initially thought it might be a fault with my motherboard so I upgraded to a new one (something which I had been intending to do anyway).

I then thought it might be a faulty mouse (Logitech wireless USB) so I bought a new one. Then I thought maybe my keyboard was the problem so I replaced it with a wired one (not as silly as it sounds - I had spilled beer all over both mouse & keyboard a couple of days before I installed the gfx card).

As the 48xx cards run pretty hot I though that could be it, so I fitted a Zalman cooler. This reduced the temperature significantly but didn't solve the problem.

There is one other oddness apart from the 'sticky' mouse and that is that when Windows boots, just before the logon screen appears I briefly get a black screen with a white bar across the top, about 20% of the screen's height.

Any ideas? I think that if it is a faulty card I might be in trouble because apart from these small quirks it works properly, so if I return it they're just going to test it and say that everything is fine. Plus, i've removed the cooler and probably invalidated my warranty

Nelviticus

 

[wahnula]

I'm guessing that the card is SO new that the drivers aren't quite stable yet, although a return would answer that question. I would probably RMA the card. In my experience, they don't micro-analyze each piece returned. they will probably send you a new card and as long as the thermal paste matches in color (and you return the original cooler) I don't anticipate any problems.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Nelviticus]

Hmm, I might try sending it back then. I was really wondering whether this is a known ATI quirk as this is the first time I've used their drivers.

I should point out that I started off using the drivers that came on the DVD, then I applied the hotfix which ATI released for the 48xx cards and now I'm using the latest official Catalyst release. So that's three sets of drivers all with the same problem.

Nelviticus

 

[wahnula]

Did you completely remove all traces of the Nvidia driver? There are lots of utilities that can help with this. This card is so new that "known issues" are probably restricted to ATI brass at this point, it will filter down to us peons eventually.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Nelviticus]

I uninstalled the nVidia drivers through Control Panel, but in any case when I upgraded my motherboard I re-installed my OS from scratch and nVidia drivers haven't been anywhere near it.

I will hunt around a bit more to see whether I'm not the only one with this problem, but more and more I'm thinking it's a faulty card in which case I will try to convince them to swap it.

Thanks for the input.

Nelviticus

 

[Leozack]

I'm using a new ATI 4870 and the yumminess is abounding. MAke sure you kill ALL nvidia drivers and startup reg entries and so on, perhaps using a util (ATI ones have UninstallAll.exe tool to do that before installing each new version of catalists) and of course use the very latest ATI drivers.
I've had no issues like those you mention so I don't think it's a driver issue. Possibly a dodgy card, possibly a processing issue since usb mice especially slow down when the cpu is doing lots of work (this never happened with PS2 mice, perhaps whack one in and try that). The white bar screen thing is slightly odd. If it's just a brief moment during boot while changing screen resolutions etc then it could probably be ignored. Just for the sake of it, swap the monitor over for a test run maybe? Of course I'd hate to suggest a cpu issue but hmm :/ Putting your previous card back in for a test run wouldn't be a bad plan, though like I said anytime you use new driver versions let alone swapping nvidia/ati you must clean off ALL traces of the previous driver for best results (essentially for any results!).

_________________________________
Leozack

MakeUniverse($infinity,1,42);

 

[Nelviticus]

It's now a clean install so there's no trace of nVidia drivers. I have two monitors attached and I get the white bar thing on both - it's a big block of white with the lowest row of pixels only a third of the screen wide. Hard to describe but it doesn't look normal!

I will give the old card a go - if I don't get mouse lagginess then the ATI card is going back.

Nelviticus

 

[deenap]

ive had a nvidia card bomb out on me, with over heating
and causing my pc to reboot consistantly, returned the card and was issued with a brand new one, apperantly the batch were faulty,so some times its just our bad luck we get stuck with faulty equipment

 

[Nelviticus]

Well I ended up sending it back and they tested it, found no problems and I had to pay the carriage fees.

When I took it out to send off I switched back to my old nVidia card and the problems went away. However, before the ATI card came back they started showing up again on the nVidia card too, so it's definitely a problem elsewhere in my system.

I had forgotten that I had also installed a CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter when I first installed the ATI card so I removed it. This has reduced the problem but it still happens - I think it might be something to do with using 'fake' RAID, i.e. the type of RAID where you have to install drivers. My next step is to switch back to my old 'real' RAID card and see whether that sorts it out once an for all, but that's a major job!

Nelviticus

 

[deenap]

I guess to my luck it were the hardware at fault so in yours i guess it aint, have you tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the card

 

[paparazi]

My reasoning on this one:
1) Try it in another machine to see if it is effected in the same way.
2) Clean install Windows if all else fails.

Until that point you are not going to be 100% sure if the card is indeed faulty.
Martin

On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[Nelviticus]

Hi Martin,

When I started this thread I thought the card was faulty but I am now sure that it is not. I have re-built the PC with a new motherboard - so that's effectively trying it in a different PC - but I still get (or got) the same problems.

My big mistake was that when I first got the card I changed a whole lot of things - I added the CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter, changed to a Corsair 620W power supply and added a secondary RAID array (previously I had everything on one RAID-3 array running from a dedicated RAID card, but I added a secondary RAID-1 array using the motherboard's JMicron controller). When problems ocurred, I assumed they were the graphics card's fault because they mainly showed up when I was gaming, but in reality they could have been any of the new additions.

My new build doesn't use the dedicated RAID card, instead it has a RAID-1 array and a RAID-0 array, both using the (new) motherboard's Intel ICH9R controller. As you may know this isn't 'real' RAID, it's a combination of hardware and software RAID. I still had the mouse-responsiveness problem with this build until I got rid of the CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter, which pretty much cured it. The mouse still sometimes misses the odd click but it's nowhere near as bad as it was.

Thanks for everyone's input; I think this thread is now closed as the problem is now virtually gone, and in any case I don't think it was ever the graphics card's fault. If I decide that I want to eradicate it totally I will start a new thread in PC Hardware.

The moral of the story? Only make one major change to your PC at a time and make sure everything works before moving on to the next upgrade!

Regards

Nelviticus