bikerdude on 7/11/2008 at 18:59

---

Whats the make/model of your psu..?

biker

bikerdude on 7/11/2008 at 19:55

---

looks like a good psu, good enough for what you need it to do ;-)

b.

Matthew on 8/12/2008 at 21:48

---

Sooo, my 4870 arrived in the post today - I had to remove the Thermaltake cooler I'd put on my Northbridge and replace the low-profile passive cooler in order to fit the card in.

So! Now when I start Vista I end up with coloured horizontal 'static' lines on the screen, then Vista eventually bombs out with a BSoD that says 'MEMORY_MANAGEMENT'. Have I fucked something up terribly?

Matthew on 9/12/2008 at 10:03

---

It doesn't do it in safe mode so I suspect that it's not the Northbridge overheating, if that's what you're thinking. I'll try to take pics of the board tonight.

It does something similar in XP now, after installing the ATi drivers the display was fine at 800 x 600 but when I pushed it up to 1920 x 1200 I got graphical glitches and an eventual crash as programs began to have errors and close.

EDIT: some more info:


My specs are as follows:

- O/S: Vista SP1 64bit ENG / XP Home SP3 ENG Dual-Boot
- VGA Driver: ATi Catalyst 8.11

- VGA: Palit 4870 Sonic 1Gb Dual Edition
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.1 Ghz)
- MB: MSI K9N SLI Platinum
- Memory: Corsair XMS2 DDR2 PC2-800 (4 x 1Gb = 4Gb)
- PSU: Thermaltake Purepower 520W 'Power Station'
- H.D.D.s: Hitachi Deskstar 250Gb x 3 (SATAII)
WD Caviar Black 1Gb x 1 (SATAII)

When I installed the card and the drivers, Vista didn't actually shut down properly but I turned it off manually and restarted. I didn't see any BIOS note appear on-screen during boot the way my old nVidia 7900GT would display one. The Vista login screen appeared but had horizontal coloured lines across it, which appeared on the desktop as well. I bumped the card up to use 1920 x 1200 resolution, whereupon various different progams stopped responding and closed, finally resulting in a Blue Screen of Death with the error 'MEMORY_MANAGEMENT'.

Subsequent attempts to start up result in an immediate BSoD as above.

I then booted to XP to see if it was a Vista problem. I installed the drivers and was able to restart XP in 800 x 600 mode with no problems that I could see, but when I changed resolution to 1920 x 1200 the title bars of my windows became 'smeared', I started getting artifacting on the windows and inevitably the system crashed again.

The crash issues and artifacting do not appear in Safe Mode when the card is not active.

Do you think that I may have a power supply issue? I think I only get 12a per rail on my PSU, so we're talking perhaps 24a overall, plus the PSU is about 3 years old.

Edit edit: upon using Thermaltake's (http://http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com/index.jsp) PSU rating webpage again today, I added 35% PSU capacitator aging to simulate the age of my device and got a requirement for 620W! Perhaps I do need that OCZ Silencer PSU after all ...

Matthew on 9/12/2008 at 22:28

---

This card comes pre-equipped with a twin-fan heatpipe cooler. :p