Questions about overclocking an HD3870.

[Blazer1]

I have been fighting a problem with a newly installed Sapphire HD3870. I can not get it stable! I have been overclocking with ATI CCC 8.12, should I try Riva Tuner? Would that make any difference in how stabile the overclock was? The card goes into VPU recovery for no reason, even while on the internet. I have tried reinstalling drivers, running Drive Sweeper, cleaning my registry with CCleaner, nothing has worked.

I set the gpu at 860 (default 776) and the memory at 1151 (default 1126) and ran 3DMark06 for a score of 11477, my best yet. At the end of running the benchmark my gpu temp was 51c. If I try to game at this setting it goes into recovery mode but the temps are less than 50c., why is it not stabile???

My system;
E6400@2.6GHz
2GB G-Skill 800MHz ram
HD 3870

 

[Maelstrom]

Yeah I would try riva tuner, I haven't had much luck overclocking using CCC. You could also try lowering clocks a bit and see if they work

 

[spearman914]

What;s your memory timings? is it 4-4-4-12 or 5-5-5-15?

 

[Maelstrom]

What;s your memory timings? is it 4-4-4-12 or 5-5-5-15?

whats that have to do with overclocking gfx card??

 

[spearman914]

whats that have to do with overclocking gfx card??

I’ve seen some people loosened there timings and able to get there gpu oc’s stable. Kinda weird but worth a shot.

 

[Blazer1]

I have no idea on my memory timing, the Bios is locked and no utilities will report it.

Even if I lower my clocks to default it is not stable. I just decided if I am going to have to live with a unstable graphics card I will overclock it.

For a little more of the story, I have a locked bios so I have to use Clockgen to overclock my cpu. I raised my fsb from 266 to 324 to take my E6400 from 2.13GHz to 2.60GHz. I can go as high as 2.85GHz by raising only my fsb but my computer really does not like it, I get the BSOD when the cpu is stressed. Could I be effecting my graphics card by raising my fsb?

 

[Maelstrom]

I’ve seen some people loosened there timings and able to get there gpu oc’s stable. Kinda weird but worth a shot.

Ah interesting, never knew

 

[spearman914]

Might as well try a bios flash, if doesn’t work this narrows down to one choice, RMA.

 

[Hitman]

Hello
I have the ATI 3870
And at first it would not overclock at all using any app it was locked up tite as they say.
But there is a thred here that will help you on how to flash and volt mod this card.
It helped me, I did not do the volt mod as I am not comfortable with that but I did do a bios flash to unlock it and that worked great.
But it won't go above 840 core 1165 memory as anything above that it becomes unstable and I get the recovery thing but at the above OC it works great.
My bench marks are about the same as yours
Here is the link to the thread above
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=48544
Random is a cool dude he helped me.

Hitman