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Okay, sometimes miracles happen in life... just that I don't know what happened. I try to sum up the status quo as well as what I gather so far. Please bridgman have a look at this as maybe ( maybe ) this points to a flaw in the design of the 4870.
Status Quo:
Old Card: Tried reseating it, blowing the connectors, placing it in alternate pci-e slots, didn't work. Tech support said it is faulty and replaced it
New Card:
Now it gets strange. After I updated the BIOS I had been back to the situation of the old card, hence Windows auto-reboots and Linux hangs. I reseated the card and also blew the connectors to no avail.
Then I Tried to card on the second ( instead of the primary ) pci-e slot. The miracle happened.
Windows: messed with 2D stuff, played two games ( one less graphic hungry one graphic hungry ). I had no single crash and it ran at full speed ( I assume, not benched things yet ).
Linux: messed with 2D stuff, played video, played OpenArena and UT2004-Demo, messed with Blender3D, compiled and run my game-engine/game.
Video Playback: Worked rather flawlessly. Watched some videos, had no tearing, no deinterlace troubles, run smoothly. Only hickup is when going back from full-screen. Closing MPlayer fixes this. ( ATI-TODO: Fix the full-screen bug )
Playing OA/UT2K4: No problems. Played OA in window mode and UT2K4 in full screen mode. No crashes, no delays, no slowdowns, smooth as it should be. And the fans kept purring silently like kitties
.
Own Engine/Game: Worked too... sort of... after dealing with ATI specific OpenGL troubles. Seems though to also work with in-progress ( hence not fully stable ) programs/games. Surprised to see this flawless record after the past troubles.
Blender3D: This is a problem. Going full-screen it tends to tear and using other windows is futile like in the MPlayer full screen case. Good news: with a little hack it can be helped though. Just start Blender3D with "blender -p 0 0 X Y" where X and Y are your screen dimensions minus lets say 50. I used "blender -p 0 0 1600 1000" and it starts without tearing. You can go full-screen after this point without any troubles.
Only negative point: Starting KDM Login Manager caused lockup. I resorted to startxfce4 and used an XFCE4 session. Had not a single crash nor other problems and shutting down also worked without a lockup.
Analysis:
Now comes the hard part... the "why". I have no idea why it works. I have 3 pci-e 16x slots in the machine here. The ASUS board though has a little particularity which might be a problem or it might be a design flaw in the 4870. This is where bridgman comes into play. I'll write down what's in my manual, maybe this helps to detect the problem ( 1st and 3rd slots are blue, 2nd is black... i assume this is the universal one and the one the card is working in right now ):
Manual recommends plugging a single card into the primary ( blue ) slot. There it shows the crashing symptoms. In the second ( black ) slot it works. One interpretation is that the primary slot is defunct, which though I thought as then the card should not have worked at all ( I think ). The second interpretation is that the card itself ( by design ) has troubles with 16x mode. Could it be the board switches to a lower frequency mode in the middle slot which is not too high for this card? Grasping for straws maybe but something has to trigger this. If somebody can shed some light on this or would like to test himself what could be wrong he's welcome.
Status Quo:
Old Card: Tried reseating it, blowing the connectors, placing it in alternate pci-e slots, didn't work. Tech support said it is faulty and replaced it
New Card:
Now it gets strange. After I updated the BIOS I had been back to the situation of the old card, hence Windows auto-reboots and Linux hangs. I reseated the card and also blew the connectors to no avail.
Then I Tried to card on the second ( instead of the primary ) pci-e slot. The miracle happened.
Windows: messed with 2D stuff, played two games ( one less graphic hungry one graphic hungry ). I had no single crash and it ran at full speed ( I assume, not benched things yet ).
Linux: messed with 2D stuff, played video, played OpenArena and UT2004-Demo, messed with Blender3D, compiled and run my game-engine/game.
Video Playback: Worked rather flawlessly. Watched some videos, had no tearing, no deinterlace troubles, run smoothly. Only hickup is when going back from full-screen. Closing MPlayer fixes this. ( ATI-TODO: Fix the full-screen bug )
Playing OA/UT2K4: No problems. Played OA in window mode and UT2K4 in full screen mode. No crashes, no delays, no slowdowns, smooth as it should be. And the fans kept purring silently like kitties
.Own Engine/Game: Worked too... sort of... after dealing with ATI specific OpenGL troubles. Seems though to also work with in-progress ( hence not fully stable ) programs/games. Surprised to see this flawless record after the past troubles.
Blender3D: This is a problem. Going full-screen it tends to tear and using other windows is futile like in the MPlayer full screen case. Good news: with a little hack it can be helped though. Just start Blender3D with "blender -p 0 0 X Y" where X and Y are your screen dimensions minus lets say 50. I used "blender -p 0 0 1600 1000" and it starts without tearing. You can go full-screen after this point without any troubles.
Only negative point: Starting KDM Login Manager caused lockup. I resorted to startxfce4 and used an XFCE4 session. Had not a single crash nor other problems and shutting down also worked without a lockup.
Analysis:
Now comes the hard part... the "why". I have no idea why it works. I have 3 pci-e 16x slots in the machine here. The ASUS board though has a little particularity which might be a problem or it might be a design flaw in the 4870. This is where bridgman comes into play. I'll write down what's in my manual, maybe this helps to detect the problem ( 1st and 3rd slots are blue, 2nd is black... i assume this is the universal one and the one the card is working in right now ):
3 PCI-E slots x16 primary + universals ( max 8x ).
Universal slot changes operation frequency depending on used PCI-E card.
Slot occupation:
occupation | slot 1 | slot 2 | slot 3 |
-----------+--------+--------+--------+
1 card | 16x | 1x | 16x |
2 cards | 16x | 1x | 16x |
3 cards | 8x | 8x | 8x |
Universal slot changes operation frequency depending on used PCI-E card.
Slot occupation:
occupation | slot 1 | slot 2 | slot 3 |
-----------+--------+--------+--------+
1 card | 16x | 1x | 16x |
2 cards | 16x | 1x | 16x |
3 cards | 8x | 8x | 8x |
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