AMD Catalyst 9.8 Delivers New Kernel Support

[mirv]

Am I? I have bought a HD4870 X2. On Windows XP I keep getting BSOD's due to the ATI driver. And that's not with heavy 3D. No sir. It's usually when I'm on the 2D desktop! And in 3D games most shadows are not even texture filtered (Red Alert 3, Colin Mcrae Dirt)

OK no worries, we have Linux also. Guess what? X.org is in the middle of a complete rework for the r6xx and the proprietary driver is a crying shame.

So what does this mean? Am I a troll or does ATI suck that much? Well, the latter.

I might as well just throw the graphics card I payed 480 euro for in the trashcan. Thank you very much with your "Stop trolling" BS. Go fsck yourself. I mean it.

File system check complete....everything ok!
Take a chill-pill mate, calm down. Your problems are not due to ati's drivers, and if you think ati's binary linux blob drivers are a "crying shame", then you've obviously not used them in a while (you also didn't point out what you think is wrong with them).

[V!NCENT]

@V!NCENT

Maybe you bought a bad card. What make and model is it?

It's Club3D HD4870X2. EAN: CGAX-48748X2. 2D works fine in Linux and 2D in Windows XP is a problem. But when I play a 3D game there appears to be no problem at all except for shadows but only in some games. Not the usual artifacts one expects to get from a bad card.

Maybe you have a shitty power source, a bad memory module, an out-of-date bios... etc. There can be a gazillion(tm) things that can give you BSOD that are out od ATi's control. They only make the GPU and release design guides for the boards.

I first had Corsair TX 650W PSU. I thought that might had caused the problem so now I have a CoolerMaster 1000W PSU. I have Kingston RAM with correct rtc in the BIOS and MemTest gives me no errors. My motherboard is a Gigabyte S-series Ultra Durable MA790GP-DS4H. My CPU is AMD Phenom 9950 X4 with B3 stepping, so no stepping bug.

"I have bought a HD4870 X2. On Windows XP I keep getting BSOD's due to the ATI driver." Do you have any proof it's from ATi's driver? Or you are just assuming that?

The BSOD tels me that some ATI module caused the crash, so I am kinda freaking sure it's ATI's fault.

When I first bought the 3870 i put it on a ASUS am2+ mobo with 790FX and I kept getting bsod in windows and a lot of problems in debian. I was just about to return the card when I accidentally discovered that all the problems were from the... DVD-RW unit! No fucking kidding.

I have had my drives since I bought a AMD Athlon 2800 XP+ and an ATI 9800pro, so uh, no.

Also, you are an immature moron, who buys a ~500E video card to play Red Alert 3. Why are you even interested in linux if you pay 500E for a freaking video card to game on?

I, and everybody else who had that game running on the highest settings at 1680x1050 gets about 45fps thank you very much. The reason I bought such an expensive ATI card is because:
A) I plan to do 5-6 years with my computer (and fixing what breaks);
B) I choose ATI for going FLOSS and;
C) Because I need immense power for FLOSS drivers because usually the FLOSS drivers performance suck due to the lack of ugly hacks and shortcuts.

Okey is that enough 'justification' for you?

[V!NCENT]

PS: Oh and D) Because in 5-6 years maybe there's a chance that Wine catches up to Windows XP games and there might be more serious games for Linux and by that time I am too old for gaming (25-26 yo by then)

[CNCFarraday]

Hmm... I might be able to get my hands on a 4870 x2 for testing purposes. Try a clean XP install. If you can - if you have a spare hdd around - try installing vista 32/64 and see how that works.

Holy crap! A 1000W PSU?? I have a wattmeter hooked up to the most powerful computer, with a 125W cpu, a 100+W gpu, 4x 3.5 hdd a i/o card and the worst load, in windows while playing farcry2 with some stuff in the bg to keep all 4 cores busy, the total draw is ~320W...

Also , googling for <"club 3d" + HD4870X2> yields quite a few posts on various forums with people getting bsod on Windows XP with this card... It *could* be that Club3D made a shitty card... ?

Try to make sure it is adequately cooled, maybe it is overheating...

[V!NCENT]

Hmm... I might be able to get my hands on a 4870 x2 for testing purposes. Try a clean XP install. If you can - if you have a spare hdd around - try installing vista 32/64 and see how that works.

I had Windows 7 beta running without problems for as long as I tried it. Everything was slower so I dumped it 64bit.

Holy crap! A 1000W PSU??

Motherboard 125W
Phenom 9950 140W
HD4870X2 350W
125+140+350=615W

And that's without the HDD and disc drives :P

But we aren't there yet :-o Enter 80% efficiency >.<

650W * 0,8 = 520W PSU
1000W * 0,8 = 800W PSU

Also , googling for <"club 3d" + HD4870X2> yields quite a few posts on various forums with people getting bsod on Windows XP with this card... It *could* be that Club3D made a shitty card... ?

A suggested fix in the official ATI forum (http://forums.amd.com/game/messagevi...hreadid=115820) is to flash the BIOS and reinstall Windows. I have build this PC from scratch and so no ther card has ever been in the PCI slot and the HDD was also new (Samsung 1TB) and so the Windows XP install was kinda 'clean' enough As long as I don't have any other options left I might flas the BIOS but if it ain't broke that I don't want to flash it.

Try to make sure it is adequately cooled, maybe it is overheating...

Bridgman once said on this forums that the card could handle 120 degrees celsius. The CCC tells me the card is 60 degrees celsius idle (I opened up the case and put a household fan in front of it xD

[energyman]

motherboard 125W? where do you get that numbers?
same for the card? Have you confused overall energy usage with one component?

I have/had a 125W cpu, an overclocked 3870 - itself a very hot card - and I had an energy consumption of:
106W in KDE.

with three harddisks. And 4 fans. And a hvd scsi card, sound card, tv card.

Highest load was:
300W - and to reach that I had to 'trick' the system. Because 'just gaming' or 'just compiling' did not break the 200W barrier.

[energyman]

oh, and your mathematics are wrong. The Wattage of the PSU is on the mainboard side.

So you would have got away with a 600W psu and still would have had headroom.

Your 1000W psu is sucking in 1250W. And 700W are wasted. Well done!

[V!NCENT]

motherboard 125W? where do you get that numbers?

http://tweakers.net/ <-Dutch website. But just looking at the cooler on that thing says enough. Google for a picture.

I have/had a 125W cpu, an overclocked 3870 - itself a very hot card - and I had an energy consumption of:
106W in KDE.

You need a special motherboard to handle the Phenom 9950 X4 as that draws 140W. I googled for the right motherboard and somewhere on the official AMD forums I found which motherboard I needed. A 3870? I have two 4870's on one chip (hence the 'X2' behind the name). Oh and KDE (what version?) is not really a good reference for calculating how much power your computer needs under max load in order to stay stable. Also: it's a well accepted fact that PSU's with more than the minimum Watt requirement make your PC a little more stable.

with three harddisks. And 4 fans. And a hvd scsi card, sound card, tv card.

Yeah I have one 'large' fan, floppy drive, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Sata-3 HDD, webcam, wireless controller reciever, cardreader, front-audio and an external HDD and usually one USB stick plugged in.

Highest load was:
300W - and to reach that I had to 'trick' the system. Because 'just gaming' or 'just compiling' did not break the 200W barrier.

Get Wine and download Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/) to get your CPU usage up to 100% (haha), then, while Steam Window is not minimised, go to YouTube with Firefox and the official Adobe Flash Plugin and stream this video in HD and put it on fullscreen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfISlGLNU
That should at least get 2 CPU cores maxxed :') Now run the test again :P

[RealNC]

You can get decent results of your system's PSU requirements here:

http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com

Of course it might be a few watts off, but it still gives a good idea about general wattage requirements.

[energyman]

my motherboard is 140W capable and officially supported the 140W phenoms.


As I wrote, I did puish my system. Daily stuff, 106W. Tv? 116W. Compiling some fat package? 160W. Gaming? 160-200W. Artificially maxing the system? 300W.

And with artificially maxing I used cpuburn cores*2+ut2004/vegastrike, while having find walking through my system.

Measured on the plug side. So the system itself draw even less.

I googled for your board and energy consumption:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2008/08/26/gigabyte-ga-ma790gp-ds4h/13

doesn't look that high...

Not high powered PSUs make your system stable. High quality make it stable. And high wattage and high quality are not the same - and with some psu's even mutual exclusive.

In short, your PSU is way overpowered. You are wasting a lot of electricity and money.