ATi 5770 biggest mistake ive made.......

I bought an ATi 5770 and so far it seems to be the biggest mistake ive ever made in terms of buying hardware.

I get constant blue screens so i reinstalled the drivers and it ran perfectly fine (used driver sweeper and everything) then switched it on this morning and bang, blue screen after blue screen, reinstalled the drivers again and guess what...... yep its working fine again. Its a shame because its a good card when its working properly but if it does it again i'm gonna have no choice but to send it back and reinstall my Nvidia 8800.

On another note its nothing to do with psu or anything because its easily enough to power this card and everything else ive got in the pc.

Rob. what motherboard you running? Checked their site for any chipset updates?

That's been my biggest issue with ATI based cards...bad drivers or lack thereof. After great experiences with everything from the original Rage Pro through 9700/9800 series cards...my last three experiences have been less than great. The result is that now I've become very 'gun-shy' about purchasing any of their products. I initially went out and bought an HD4870 a while back and while a nice piece of hardware, it stuttered like crazy in rFactor and GTR2 playbacks. Next up was the 4850x2. It would not run with any driver except those supplied on the cd which were older than the ones on first Sapphire's...then ATI's website. Yet again, it was a nice piece of hardware but "sucked royally" as far as driver's support went. It would give me the infamous code43 error and disable one of the GPUs. I eventually installed a 192sp BFG GTX260...which was supposed to be slower, but proved to be super smooth and a much better experience. I still own that card. Go figure. I would love to try an HD5870..(not so much for eyefinity/tri-monitor support, but because I'm genuinely interested in the tessellation aspect). The last few experiences, coupled with stories like yours tell me it's not time yet. Hopefully these guys can get their software and driver support where the hardware is now.

well ive got an Asus P5Q and ive plonked the card in our older pc with an old AMD Dual Core and it seems to be running fine which is wierd.

Ive got a Corsair VX450 in this pc (my main gaming pc) which is plenty enough to run my 8800 GTS 512 and ive been told (also on the box) that its enough to run the 5770. The older pc has some crappy make PSU, qtec i think it is and thats 550w and its running the 5770 fine.

I've found that when your power suplly fails to provide enough power it just switches off and does not give BSODs. I had to replace mine a few weeks ago.

it doesnt switch off the screen just went either white, red with black stripes or the background colour of the website you were on but im guessing the psu isnt powerful enough.

Very interesting reading for me here,i recently got a 4870 and a P5Q main board after a series of hardware failures,namely my P5N32 board and GF8800GTX and a 800W PSU went for good measure...
I was more than happy with the new stuff in all my games until i went in to play Evo,then it became a joke,a few tracks were ok,but most of them stuttered and ran very poorly,the only fix for it was to turn shadows off.
My replacement GF8800GTX came back from BFG on Monday so i decided to plug it back in and have a look at Evo,and sure enough every track in any cars with a full grid and shadows on ran smooth and perfect,just like before,and also i find everything else is just great as well,for me in this system a GF8800GTX outperforms a ATi 4870.
Im also awaiting a replacement mainboard for the fried P5N32,it might be a direct replacement of that model,or another Asus 775 socket board,i will be keen to try that with the 4870 in and see if behaves the same...

I heard e-rumours about some ATi cards having issues with Intel Dual Core CPU's,but i only experienced troubles in Evo,and even at that it wasnt even all tracks,for instance Brands was perfect with full grids,yet Valencia was shocking,and Brno was really atrocious.
One thing i can say about the ATi based build was how totally reliable and stable it was,i never had one...i repeat...not one crash or hiccup or failure of any kind with it,yet since i put the GF8800 back in ive had about 3 or 4 graphical style total freezey lock-ups ...i sort of know what they were though and have been tweaked away i think ,despite that i will stay with the GF8800 for now :good:.

[A niggling little voice in my head says "maybe SimBin have got something wrong?...]

Rob, here's a snippet taken from the review Lee Downham posted. (full review)

it's on page 11 of 25 of the review
[FONT=verdana,geneva]Recommended Power Supply

[FONT=verdana,geneva]So here's my power supply recommendation:[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva]Radeon HD 5770 (single GPU)[/FONT]

• [FONT=verdana,geneva]
  [*]The card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 40 Amps available on the +12 volts rails.[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana,geneva]Radeon HD 5770 CrossfireX (dual GPUs)[/FONT]

• [FONT=verdana,geneva]
  [*]A second card requires you to add another 108 Watts. You need a 600+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 55 Amps available on the +12 volts rails.[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana,geneva]For each card that you add, add another 108 Watts as a safety margin.[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva]There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:[/FONT]

• [FONT=verdana,geneva]
  [*]bad 3D performance
  [*]crashing games
  [*]spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
  [*]freezing during gameplay
  [*]PSU overload can cause it to break down[/FONT]

[/FONT]

Its more of a Sgt Major style for me. Simbin balls'd up BIG TIME. I replaced my 8800GTX because of the graphical crashes in EVO, got to the point where it became unplayable.

Thats good info Steve. I'll be looking for a replacement for my 550 Watt PSU the next time I'm in the big city.

says 450w on the box but i'm just gonna leave it in the other pc now and probably get a new psu and wait for the dx11 nvidia to come out

well its just done the same on the pc with the 550w so i am guessing its a hardware issue. I will most likely RMA it and wait for the nvidia dx11 card

ATi driver's, if you do one thing wrong you get problems or there is issue's, I know for SimBin / ISI games you get the freezing with Nvidia driver's for a few people and ATi fine but outside of those games Nvidia driver's are much more flawless in my experience of building over 100 systems so far. Saying that planning on ordering a 5750 soon for my personal rig lol.

But am guessing your issue could be more of the PSU or a faulty card Rob.

i think its faulty card because its done the same thing in 2 pc's with different psu's

Rob, I have the same MoBo... I originally had built the system with an XFX 8800 GTX 768 meg card, it ran everything smooth as silk.... except for rfactor. I had ramdom freezes, it would run fine for a week... then lock up 3 times in 10 min. I tried EVERYthing.... drivers from A to Z ... bios udates..format C:. Nothing worked, I finally had to resort to running rFactor on an antiquated 7600 GT that I had in another PC so that I could run league races without fear of lock ups.
Well after a year or so I started looking into ATI cards, I found the prices too good to pass up, so I picked up a MSI 4850 1 gig card for 119.00 from newegg.
It TOTALLY blows away my 8800 gtx in performance and stability, but I had lots of GFX anomalies in rfactor. Missing textures etc... I tried every driver available with no luck. I finally stumbled on a post from a guy who had the same issue, and many people responded with similar issues. The ONLY thing that fixed it was installing windows 7, so.... I installed it and now no issues, I run rFactor at max settings, 2560x1600 and get 150-200 FPS. Way better than my 8800 GTX.

i'm running Windows 7 on both pc's

I would do a Format C: and fresh windows and drivers...if it still happens it's probably a hardware issue.

the trouble is though i have only had Windows 7 installed on here for what, 2 months its a bit annoying if i have to format and start all over again