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Upgrading Video card: Gigabyte R9-290 Winforce


Bikerdude

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[info]

 

Im going to upgrading from the GTX670 to an ATi R290 over the weekend, but will still have an my old GTX480 (taking part ex from a mate who is buying the 670 who originally bought the 480 from moi). The upshot is I will be able to test and troubleshot any issues with contemporary ATi and nVidia hardware.

 

With the above all said, do we have any players with HD7000 series cards or higher that have any issue's I should be aware off..?

 

b.

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I know *nothing* about hardware and even less about graphics cards, but I have a Radeon HD 7800 4gb card if that qualifies... but it's 2-3 years old so maybe not relevant. I got that info from dxdiag. Checking the receipt in the box of bits under my computer desk, I see it's a Sapphire HD 7870 GDDR5 pci express if that tells you anything.

 

I get no glitches, it works great and I always keep the latest catalyst installed. I wouldn't know how to do otherwise tbh so I'm grateful the latest drivers do seem to just work!

 

Do you give free advice on upgrades? ;)

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I get no glitches, it works great and I always keep the latest catalyst installed. I wouldn't know how to do otherwise tbh so I'm grateful the latest drivers do seem to just work!

Grand, although in my case I maybe running a hybrid physx setup consisting of a 'R9 290' and a 'GT 640'.

 

Do you give free advice on upgrades?
Its a bit of a given, I have done a lot of tech supp over on the ttlg forums over the years and still do a little bit now. But I went right off the place due to the attitude of some of the people that run it and the lack of any kind of appreciation or aknolwedgement the tech support I did over there, eg DDfix thread, nVidia thread, ATi thread, Hybrid Physx thread, a monitor thread, another Ati hardware thread, a laptop thread, another laptop thread, an OpenAL/EAX thread etc, ad-infinitum.

 

I'm betting you had wished you hadn't ask now, :P:D

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the lack of any kind of appreciation or aknolwedgement the tech support I did over there,

Hmm, I opened six of the ttlg links and browsed a few of the 1830 threads captured by google for your tech advice but in the ones I looked at I have no idea what you guys were talking about! So I can't offer a meaningful conversation but I can promise proper appreciation+eternal gratitude if you tell me what's a good setup :) A good setup for games that use opengl I mean. From what I read in this forum I *think* I know that opengl behaves best with a single fast CPU rather than many slower ones, but I have no idea what makes a good graphics card choice. Ignoring price, what kind of graphics card is ideal? The one you mentioned in your OP?

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[info]

 

Im going to upgrading from the GTX670 to an ATi R290 over the weekend, but will still have an my old GTX480 (taking part ex from a mate who is buying the 670 who originally bought the 480 from moi). The upshot is I will be able to test and troubleshot any issues with contemporary ATi and nVidia hardware.

 

With the above all said, do we have any players with HD7000 series cards or higher that have any issue's I should be aware off..?

 

b.

 

I recently upgraded from 7950s to a 290X, then to 780 ti. 7950s were fine, no issues. 290x was a POS with cheap Elpida ram that would crash the video driver every time I booted up.

ATI's drivers are actually pretty decent these days.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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290 was a POS with cheap Elpida ram that would crash the video driver every time I booted up.

Thats worrying, I hope that as mines a gigabyte windforce 290 oc card it will be as solid as my gtx670 windforce has been.

 

What was the exact make and model of your 290x and did it have a custom cooler?

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What was the exact make and model of your 290x and did it have a custom cooler?

 

Uh-oh......It was a Gigabyte Windforce 290x OC. Did you get the 290 or 290x?

 

EDIT: LOL and you know what Gigabyte suggested to me? Underclock the memory to "fix" the problem.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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  • Uh-oh......It was a Gigabyte Windforce 290x OC. Did you get the 290 or 290x?
  • And you know what Gigabyte suggested to me? Underclock the memory to "fix" the problem.

  • its just the 290, as there is no point buying the 290x version at £140 more for only 5-15% more perf.
  • So I imagine your reply was f**k right off you cheaky gits..?

If my WF-290 turns out to be a lemon its all fine as I have bought from a shop, so the card has a 1yr warranty and is returnable Or worst case it goes back to Gbyte UK under thier 3 yr warranty.

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Its likely the "x OC" part of the 290 you owned AH was the faulty part. OC cards are produced with the top binned sku/parts so they're less likely to encounter issues with an OC but they're not immune to it. Its also likely that running the card at stock clocks would have totally alleviated the issues however when you pay for "x OC", you want "x OC" so yeah, you should return it.

 

Its not necessarily an issue with the card or "all cards" of that type though and Bikerdude knows that. He'll probably not have any issues with his unless he is unfortunate enough to also get a lemon but exchanging it for another at his local shop would likely end up in a good card.

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Arse...

 

I did check for non-biased reviews before considering this card, but its only now armed with AH info about memory that I am finding the real facts -

 

NewEgg from July 2014 -

 

Cons:This product has the worst reliability factor I've ever encountered in any computer hardware in the last 16 years of systems building. If you read below you'll see that I had to RMA one right away and that I'm also in the process of RMAing another just a month later. That means that of the THREE cards I've used in the past 38 days, TWO of them have failed. I've never experienced anything like this before. And, even though the chips are designed to run at 95 degrees, I have actually UNDERCLOCKED the cards by a whopping 15% so that I can keep the temps between 75-90 degrees. Even in an uncomfortably cold room I cannot get the temps any lower with this "Windforce" cooling system--definitely a disappointment there. I don't know what's wrong with these GPUs but if I could start over again I would buy the Sapphire Tri-X or just pick up the cheaper reference design and deal with all the noise and 95 degree temperatures.

 

Cons: I bought 3 and one was faulty right out the box. Tried it on 3 different computers under different OS' reloading drivers and testing in Furmark. I sent it back as an RMA and will not be replacing it. I own 5 R9 290s (2 are the gigabyte) I use them for mining coins and these cards are the most troublesome. They crash often and their performance differs. I would not purchase these again even given their higher clock rate. One bad card is one thing but the other two are troublesome for what I use them for.

Other Thoughts: Your chances of getting a bad card are higher with these.

 

Cons: Black screen error 10-15 sec. after logging in to Windows.

Other Thoughts: I was very excited to have a chance to try out one of the legendary 290's. I installed the card, installed the drivers that shipped with it, and was disappointed to learn that I'd received one of the (apparently numerous) faulty Rev 1.0 cards. It worked for about 5 minutes after installation. I restarted when prompted, and when I got back in to Windows, the screen flashed a very pretty pattern of little colored squares, then went black. Did two complete reinstalls of the card (remove drivers/software, physically remove card, reinstall), to the same effect. Not much looking forward to having a paperweight instead of a world-class GPU.

 

Cons: So I tried posting this on the card page for my Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 3GB WF3 GPU, but the company KNOWS about the inherent problems with the card and won't respond. Basically, the card has a known over voltage problem which causes an electronic whine noise at high FPS, computer crash-restarts, frequent BSODs, and in general just terrible performance. Not to mention the voltage is locked, so you can't even solve the problem yourself. Even with voltage control maxed out the problems persist. I've flashed every viable BIOS under the sun to this card and it simply refuses to work reliably. I'm never purchasing a Gigabyte product ever again.

 

The list is just more of the same, now in my case the card was tested before being bought in from the shop(www.cex.co.uk) I'm buying it from, so I am hoping I have a "good card" but if it turns out to be a lemon I will swap it for a GTX 770 as the 780 is not worth the £140 for the same perf as the 290. or you never know Gbyte might provide a late rev version of the 290.

 

But I will deal with if and when it happens.

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That's because The Darkmod does NOT currently support OpenAL' date=' it ONLY support EAX atm.[/size']

 

 

Bikerdude is this quote that i got from your link above about OpenAL on Darkmod true?

 

Doom 3 supports (creative) OpenAL natively did you guys removed that from the engine?

 

Is strange if true because why would you guys do that! And also i've used Rapture3D to play Darkmod and it seemed to work and it is a OpenAL only (unfortunately) audio software.

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I have done a lot of tech supp over on the ttlg forums over the years and still do a little bit now. But I went right off the place due to the attitude of some of the people that run it and the lack of any kind of appreciation or aknolwedgement the tech support I did over there, eg DDfix thread, nVidia thread, ATi thread, Hybrid Physx thread, a monitor thread, another Ati hardware thread, a laptop thread, another laptop thread, an OpenAL/EAX thread etc, ad-infinitum.

 

I understand you. For my case I must admit that I'm too lazy to write answers like "I got that" or even "Thanks for the answer". Maybe I should change my behavior, so I can train my english skills. Oh, and I hope I didn't wrong you in the OpenAL/EAX thread. :blush:

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Its likely the "x OC" part of the 290 you owned AH was the faulty part. OC cards are produced with the top binned sku/parts so they're less likely to encounter issues with an OC but they're not immune to it. Its also likely that running the card at stock clocks would have totally alleviated the issues however when you pay for "x OC", you want "x OC" so yeah, you should return it.

 

Its not necessarily an issue with the card or "all cards" of that type though and Bikerdude knows that. He'll probably not have any issues with his unless he is unfortunate enough to also get a lemon but exchanging it for another at his local shop would likely end up in a good card.

 

I did return it, twice. After the third card did the same thing, I said FU gigabyte and went Nvidia 780 ti. The big problem wasn't that they were using lower quality binned chips in the 290x OC cards, they were actually using high end bins. The problem was that they were cheaping out on the memory to get the price point down as low as possible. Elpida memory apparently has issues being overclocked. If I underclocked the memory the card ran perfectly, and I could also overclock the GPU up to 1200 before needing to increase voltage, they were really good binned parts.

I guess I could have gone with another AiB partner, but I loved the Windforce cooler, it's quiet and really good at cooling. Oh well, I had several years of faithful over clocks from my Gigabyte Windforce Radeon 7950 OCs, so I will probably go back to Gigabyte in the future when it's time to upgrade again.

But that won't be for several YEARS at least. This combo of i7 4770k @ 4.4/4.5 Ghz and GTX 780ti handle everything I throw at them, especially since I game at 1920x1200.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Doom 3 supports (creative) OpenAL natively did you guys removed that from the engine?

No, D3 only supports EAX.You might be thinking of D3-BFG.

And I hope I didn't wrong you in the OpenAL/EAX thread.

Not at all mister, I was getting frustrated with the thread poster thopugh as I had to repeatmyself a few times..

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Sorry but you are wrong Doom 3 does support OpenAL (the Creative one without EFX only EAX 4.0) i have it enabled on the .cfg i think is not enabled by default tho.

 

this is what i have on my Doom 3 .cfg you can do the same with Darkmod.

 

seta s_useOpenAL "1"

seta s_libOpenAL "rapture3d_aol.dll" // This is the commercial Rapture3D software that enables HRTF sound on OpenAL games.

Edited by HMart
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This combo of i7 4770k @ 4.4/4.5 Ghz and GTX 780ti handle everything I throw at them, especially since I game at 1920x1200.

 

It will indeed. If it weren't for an ultra texture bug in Watch_Dogs, the 780 super clock w/2600k @4.4ghz runs 3x 1920x1200 with ultra everything (amazingly gorgeous game btw). Its a great card.

 

I do hope Gigabyte gets that card straighten out and doesn't tarnish their image with that non-sense. I've run Gigabyte boards my last three systems and it would suck if they went the way of Abit. Poor Abit...

Edited by Lux
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Sorry but you are wrong Doom 3 does support OpenAL (the Creative one without EFX only EAX 4.0) i have it enabled on the .cfg i think is not enabled by default tho.

Fair enough, but for what ever reason we have a problem with OpenAL - http://forums.thedar...9-openal-issue/

I've run Gigabyte boards my last three systems and it would suck if they went the way of Abit. Poor Abit...

Yeah I used to have one of thier boards back in the day.

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@Bikerdude: Okay, alright. To get ontopic from myself: I run a Radeon HD7770 and have no problems with TDM. I know this card is weaker than you choice but I like these one because the low noise level. If I buy a new card someday, then it has to be also a quiet one. ^^

Edited by PsymH
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Don't use furmark, not only does it really stress your card, the drivers auto throttle the app.

Use Heaven benchmark instead.

And 90C on Furmark is about normal for the 290s they run hot.

EDIT: And almost 30C room temp is hot lol, I keep my room at like 20-22.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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