New ATI 3.8 drivers *can* cause overheating.

R

Razorscott2YK

Guest
I browse a few other websites and one of my favorites is megagames, which i got the following info from...

While ATI have been enjoying a string of successes at the expense of their rivals, NVidia, it seems that ATI's old Achilles' heel, driver issues, may be about to create new problems. According to various emails received by MegaGames and to a variety of forums, the new Catalyst drivers, hailed by ATI as the single biggest software upgrade in its history, are causing some cards to overheat. The same messages also suggest that the OMEGA version of the drivers also create the same problem.

The problem is not present across the ATI board range but seems specific to the following cards:

All Radeon 9800 XT's
All Radeon 9800 Pro
All Radeon 9800
All Radeon 9700 Pro soft-modded to 9800 series.
All Radeon 9700 soft-modded to 9800 series.
All Radeon 9500 soft modded to 9800 series

These reports have not yet been independently confirmed and the problem, if indeed there is one, may have to do with specific system configurations. The persistence of some of the messages we received does however force us to raise the issue in order to warn ATI owners of the possible threat to their boards and systems.

It is up to ATI then, in the new spirit of comprehensive customer support, when drivers are concerned, to clear up the issue and either reassure owners or release some form of corrected drivers.

MegaGames will keep you informed of any news from ATI or ATI-owners.


Just thought all you ATI owners might wanna know... if your having problems.

-Razor2YK
 
Thanks for the info. Should help a few fortunate people to not have their nice ATI cards overheat and fry. :D
 
Thank you I didn't know. Going back to 3.7. Don't want to burn my new box :)
 
ati has addressed this on the front page of rage3d.com, there is no issue unless you're overclocking.
 
Originally posted by Xtasy0
ati has addressed this on the front page of rage3d.com, there is no issue unless you're overclocking.
Click to expand...
 
Mine's having no problems whatsoever and it's not overclocked.

Why the hell would you over clock a 9800 Pro anyway, when the chances are it's not even running at maximum capacity? Nothing around now challenges it that much. Mine's actually being held back by my CPU.
 
Originally posted by Wildhound
Mine's having no problems whatsoever and it's not overclocked.

Why the hell would you over clock a 9800 Pro anyway, when the chances are it's not even running at maximum capacity? Nothing around now challenges it that much. Mine's actually being held back by my CPU.
Click to expand...
Some people just like to feel like they have a bigger penis :dozey:. I never understood why someone would overclock a top of the line card and risk throwing $300 down the crapper because they want a few extra MHz in their GPU when no game needs that speed.
 
Originally posted by Razorscott2YK
I browse a few other websites and one of my favorites is megagames, which i got the following info from...

While ATI have been enjoying a string of successes at the expense of their rivals, NVidia, it seems that ATI's old Achilles' heel, driver issues, may be about to create new problems. According to various emails received by MegaGames and to a variety of forums, the new Catalyst drivers, hailed by ATI as the single biggest software upgrade in its history, are causing some cards to overheat. The same messages also suggest that the OMEGA version of the drivers also create the same problem.

The problem is not present across the ATI board range but seems specific to the following cards:

All Radeon 9800 XT's
All Radeon 9800 Pro
All Radeon 9800
All Radeon 9700 Pro soft-modded to 9800 series.
All Radeon 9700 soft-modded to 9800 series.
All Radeon 9500 soft modded to 9800 series

These reports have not yet been independently confirmed and the problem, if indeed there is one, may have to do with specific system configurations. The persistence of some of the messages we received does however force us to raise the issue in order to warn ATI owners of the possible threat to their boards and systems.

It is up to ATI then, in the new spirit of comprehensive customer support, when drivers are concerned, to clear up the issue and either reassure owners or release some form of corrected drivers.

MegaGames will keep you informed of any news from ATI or ATI-owners.


Just thought all you ATI owners might wanna know... if your having problems.

-Razor2YK
Click to expand...

http://www.rage3d.com/#1066346626 ==> Scroll down a bit.

*Igneri Edit: Watch the language.
 
Yeah, sorry for the language. Notice I wasn't directly flaming anyone, as I never have. :D
 
Somebody needs to modify the first post, and state that the drivers aren't causing ATi cards to overheat, but rather they're frying monitors.

It's being caused by a refresh rate bug in the drivers. They are forcing the refresh rate for the secondary display, during gaming, to its default max setting (200hz), causing monitors to literally fry the board inside.

http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=52230#post52230

It seems like the new driver series is attempting to pass way too many unsupported resolution/refresh rates to the monitor, overloading the monitor's relay system and frying the monitor. Instead of reading the refresh rates from the PRIMARY display INF files, it is reading the SECONDARY display INF refresh rates. For those of us with only 1 monitor hooked up, there is no SECONDARY display INF refresh rate file, to the video card starts at its own highest supported refresh rate and starts passing that onto the monitor. With Radeon 9800/9700's capable of syncing @ a refresh rate of 200 Hz, that means 99% of the world's monitors are at risk of damage.

So far, a total of 183 monitors, ranging from high-end 22" Viewsonic P225F's to lowly 14" Compaq SVGA monitors have been reported as dead/damaged due to this problem. It is to be taken seriously.

I'll attest to this problem, as my Dell UltraScan P1110 21" Trinitron has been damaged due to this problem.
Click to expand...
 
After reading that, I've switched back to the 3.7 drivers. All the 3.8 had to offer me anyway were those new effect things and I didn't even use them anyway. Hopefully, the 3.9 drivers will correct most of this stuff.
 
The 3.8 Cat drivers have some very serious graphics bugs, most notably z-fighting and texture coruption on water and opacity. A few of my games started to screw up visualy really badly esspecialy BF1942 and TAOD, and the card does get very hot. As soon as I went back to my 3.7 drivers everything was fine once again. Hmm, perhaps ATI deliberately released bad drivers so that all of us who fry our cards have to go and buy a ATI bundle with HL2. I smell conspiracy LOL, kidding..! Btw, Aquamark result was 100 points better with the 3.7 than the new 3.8. Go figure..!
 
uh, we ran tests on the cards with the different drivers..and guess what......no temp increase. someone is spreading around lies for who knows what reason.
 
Radeon 8500LE oc

I have a Sapphire 8500LE and I installed the Omega3.8 drivers, I set a core rate of 301 and memory at 380 and I do not have any overheating problem (til now at least :cheese: ) even playing hl.

By the way are the above settings possible on a Sapphire 8500LE (I even reached 310/390 but then half life freezed fews time and I lowered to the current 301/380) ?? For what I read that card should run with a 250/250 mhz... mmmm am I wrong or is those omega driver working not so good?

Anybody can solve my doubt ?

thanks!

Maxit
 
Originally posted by Rarehero
Somebody needs to modify the first post, and state that the drivers aren't causing ATi cards to overheat, but rather they're frying monitors.

It's being caused by a refresh rate bug in the drivers. They are forcing the refresh rate for the secondary display, during gaming, to its default max setting (200hz), causing monitors to literally fry the board inside.

http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=52230#post52230
Click to expand...

well ati doesn't think the monitor frying issue is caused by the drivers, heres what an ati employee had to say about it.


Chris Hook, ATI's mobile and integrated public relations manager has obtained a more technical rebuttal on Catalyst 3.8 causing hardware monitor failures.

"RESPONSE TO ALLEGED MONITOR FAILURE ISSUE

We have spent a great deal of time trying to reproduce this problem and analyzing our driver code. There is nothing in our driver code that has changed since CAT 3.7 to CAT 3.8 that could possibly cause this behaviour. We believe that our drivers are not causing these alleged problems.

We do not currently believe these stories are valid. We have already confirmed that of the nearly 100 OEM customer programs have asked for and received this driver, we have received no reports on any such problem from the OEMs. We have also run comprehensive QA tests on the driver before releasing it and have had no cases of failed monitors.

Since we announced CATALYST 3.8 on October 8th, we have recorded hundreds of thousands of downloads, and thus far there have been absolutely no reports whatsoever to ATI's Customer Support department to report monitors failing.

TECHNICAL REBUTTAL OF MONITOR FAILURE ALLEGATIONS

______________

There have been many posts in the forums discussing this issue, it seems it is a common theory, picked up from one place and keep being circulated. One such theory suggests the following:

"Instead of reading the refresh rates from the PRIMARY display INF files, it is reading the SECONDARY display INF refresh rates."

In XP and 2K, we don't have access to monitor INF information in our driver component that manages display capability. We have never used this monitor information for any purpose. We rely on EDID data or user override information to determine monitor capability. Even though the OS may use the monitor information to expose high refresh rate based on monitor INF content, the driver always restricts the actual refresh rate going to the monitor based on EDID or the user override. In essence, the user may be able to select from OS controlled monitor page (in advanced property pages) a high refresh rate but internally driver will restrict the refresh rate going to the monitor based on EDID information or user override information. If user set the override information incorrectly then incompatible signals would be sent to the monitor.

In 9x, we can access monitor INF information but due to issues with how OS maps the INF to a monitor, we had disabled reading the monitor INF via registry. Unless someone deliberately changes the registry setting for this in 9x, they would not run into any monitor INF related issues.

RESPONSE TO ALLEGED HARDWARE OVERHEATING ISSUE

We have spent a great deal of time analyzing the temperatures due to the CATALYST 3.8 drivers. We do not under any circumstance see anything near a 10 degree Celsius increase in temperature (but we don't overclock our test cards either). We do see a slight increase in temperature in certain cases (3Dmark2003 Nature Scene for example). However any temperature increase is well within our safety range. Investigation continues and we are trying to determine why this change in temperature exits. At this point we are reproducing individual driver packages with code being checked in and measuring the temperature. However nothing shows the alleged increase in temperature. One independent website even tried to reproduce this issue, and found no measurable difference in temperature between CATALYST 3.7 and 3.8."
Click to expand...
 
i would think the 9800XT cards shouldnt have a issue with this, because of there OverDrive system... when 9600XT comes it shouldnt either
 
Guess I'll be reverting back to Catalyst 3.7 just in case.. I've been running 3.8 since the day they came out, haven't had any problems as of yet, but I do NOT want to run into any
 
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