Strange HD4870 issue!

[BrosephJ]

Hello techPowerUp! forums, my first post is a cry for help. I've searched and seached but came up empty, or just used the wrong words? Not sure, lol. Anyways my GTX260 has begun resting on its deathbed and my only choice now is my dad's old card. Playing games in fullscreen mode works fine, no issue.

But whenever I attempt to play in windowed mode the high performance clock speeds never kick in, they always stay 200 core 500 mem. On top of that, the graphics overdrive never displays the correct clock speeds on the sliders and if I attempt to correct them the driver crashes. (says 500/500 there because I'm watching a flash video on my other monitor, GPU-Z doesn't show that, weird?)

Using 13.1 driver, Windows 7 x64 (while I typed this the text would randomly be blurry wtf?)
Would any of these choices fix this?
-BIOS flash
-Downgrade my driver
-3rd party utility

 

[Lazermonkey]

Try using this and see if it helps.

I'm an Nvidia guy myself, so I am not much help.

http://www.ati.com/products/catalystcontrolcenter/

 

[BrosephJ]

Wait so...Catalyst Control Center and AMD VISION Engine Control Center are 2 different things? Perhaps 13.1 driver for this card is a bad thing? But yeah, I'm mainly an Nvidia guy too. Hoping once I get this sorted I may be an AMD guy.

 

[Lazermonkey]

Intel CPU? or is an AMD?

 

[BrosephJ]

AMD Phenom II 940

 

[ALMOSTunseen]

Try using catalyst 10.10 or 10.11
From the knowledge of another user, these are the last well working drivers for this card.

 

[BrosephJ]

Alright, I'll give those a try. Thanks! I'll report my results here later, going to sleep now.

 

[ALMOSTunseen]

Also just a heads up, I do believe that with some cards/games/drivers, playing games in window can cause overdrives to not enable, and for the card to stay underclocked.

 

[BrosephJ]

I've determined that the card has a manufacturer error and have since then taken it out and put my GTX 260 back in. Tried with 13.1 drivers, 10.11 and 12.6 with same problems. I could probably flash the BIOS with a fixed one but I'd rather not risk that on a card that isn't mine. So, I'm done here!