ATI Radeon HD 3850 AGP QUESTIONS

[ShaolinMilk]

Hello techPowerUp forum,

I posted this in the sticky 3850 thread, but I'm not getting much replies.

Anyways, I bought the Sapphire 3850 AGP card not too long ago for my old pentium 4 3.0ghz 478 socket. I noticed that the default core clock is set at 300mhz and not 669mhz like the powercolor model of it. Is this how it's suppose to be?

I decided to download rivatuner to overclock my core clock to 669mhz and to set my fan at a constant 70%. My temperature in the beginning idled around the high 70's and at times, it would spike all the way up to 93C under load. So I read up a bit on it and found out I might have to disable low-level fan control and re-enable it in order for the fans to spin at the speed I want it to. After A LOT of trial and error, I managed to get the temperature down to around 69-70C on idle. This is still high considering it's on idle and the idle temperature at a core clock of 300mhz was around 59C or so. This is about a 10C difference and I'm wondering if this is normal? When I play games, it would go up to 80-82C and not 93C like when I originally tried it. Should I set it back to it's default settings or should I keep it at this setting? I heard that this video card can go up to 85C without any complications at all. Running at around 70C on idle, is this safe at all? It doesn't seem safe to me, but I noticed a pretty big difference in my gaming compared to when it was not overclocked at all.

 

[OneMoar]

you can use ATI traytools to set the fan to 100% when the temp exceeds 80c ( like I did) didn't really help much the 3850s had defective coolers
the 300 core is normal the card down-clocks when not under load 93c is pretty good my 3850 used to hit 114c (its now dead btw after 1 year of use ) I would really look into something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161284
OR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161308

 

[Sir_Real]

I used to own a sapphire HD3850 & to me honist i found a p4 3.0ghz didnt really have the power to run the card anywhere near its full pertenchal.
Anyway that gpu will have a core speed of 300mhz wen idle & jump upto 669mhz the second you start a graphically intensive app such as a game. Its an energy saving thing.
Your temps seem about right for that gpu the sapphire version has a rather poor cooler fitted. Put the fan speed in ccc to around 75% or more if the noise isnt to annoying. Extra case fans or leaving the side panel off will help keep the temp down.

 

[ShaolinMilk]

It seems like it stays at 300mhz to me; where can I check to see if it changes when I run a graphic intensive game?

 

[OneMoar]

use atitray tools and its flash osd ( you can set it to display all kinds of info )

 

[Yukikaze]

I used to own a sapphire HD3850 & to me honist i found a p4 3.0ghz didnt really have the power to run the card anywhere near its full pertenchal.

I used to run this card with a P4 overclocked to 4.2Ghz. It still held back the card.

 

[Yukikaze]

It seems like it stays at 300mhz to me; where can I check to see if it changes when I run a graphic intensive game?

Use GPU-Z and click the "update while in background" checkbox in the sensors tab. Enter a game, run around for 10 seconds, then exit. Check the sensors tab and check the clocks graph.

 

[ShaolinMilk]

Hi, thank you for the help.

I ran into a problem. I'm not sure exactly what I did, but now my computer doesn't shut down. It stays on the shutdown screen, but the power light on my tower turns off.

 

[hat]

How are you shutting the pc down... start menu - shut down or just hitting the button? If you're hitting the button, look around in your power options and see what it says it will do wen you press the power button. Sometimes it gets set to sleep mode or hibernation mode by default and it got reset somehow.

Also, as far as your video card goes, you might want to pick up a better cooler. The Zalman VF900 is about $40 new, and I'm sure you can find one used somewhere... I think I paid like $20 for mine.

 

[ShaolinMilk]

I go to start menu/shut down to turn it off. It just stalls on the "windows is shutting down" screen.

 

[hat]

Sounds like something got corrupted... you might have to reinstall windows

 

[hat]

Regarding cooling for your gpu... there's a vf900 for $20 here
http://techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119773

 

[OneMoar]

if you can boot into safe mode
open a cmd prompt and type sfc /scannow
and run chkdsk c: /f /r

 

[ShaolinMilk]

Hi, thank you for the suggestions.

I have tried to run chkdsk, but I get the following error:

Windows File Protection could not initiate a scan of protected system files.

The specific error code is 0x000006ba [The RPC server is unavailable.]