I have two ASUS ATI 4970 video cards that have given me a lot grief.
The cooling fans on both died. It took the first one six months and
the second one 11 months to die. Asus support proved worse then
useless so I ended up putting a Arctic Cooling Silent solution the
first one, and then my own replacement fan on the other. Temps have been fine.
I don't game that much and what I have done has never gotten them very warm.
Card number 1 powers a Gateway XHD3000 thirty inch display. and video
card number 2 drives two Dell 24 inch displays. I have a brand new
Sesonic 12S 850 watt PS so I have lots good clean power to power the cards.
I installed Win 7 in December and have had worsening video problems
on card number 1 with the 30 inch monitor since mid january. At the
beginning of the month I started seeing white lines on my desktop
www.winterlight.org/lines.jpg . I tried updating the video driver
which only made things much worse. Screen breakups are routine,
and the last couple of weeks I have had popups that say Display
driver stopped responding and has recovered. I try going back to
version 9x drivers but it didn't help much.
Lots of people seem to be having problems with that error message and
ATI drivers. However, I have the white lines issue which seems to
always come up when I reboot and then disappear when I boot again.
Maybe the drivers are choking at the high resolution, maybe the card
#1 is bad. The other thing is that the Dell monitors coming off the
second Video card are fine. I don't know if I have a bad card, bad
drivers or both and how to find out.
I am so frustrated with it that if I could buy a single card to
handle all the monitors I would do it. If I knew the 1 video card was
bad I would replace it... do you have to have a exact match for
crossfire... or does just the chip = 4870 have to match? thanks
