3850 AGP OC'ing, Vmods, experiences, suggestions, where to buy

[Jayzilla]

Are you sure that the card was all the way inside the AGP slot? Sometimes getting the lock to click isn't enough. I think you're already tried that but if you haven't give it a shot.

If it works on the other board it should work on the Asrock too.

Yeah. It is all the way in. I just don't know why. It takes other HD3850 but not the Turbo one. I was on my way to test the Zotac cards. I hope I can make it work with other Asrock board. It is the main part of this project. If it died I have to put the project on hold til I fould another one. Oh God. Why??

 

[TRWOV]

mmm... have you tried without connecting the power cable to the card and see if the card bios flashes the warning message?

Have you modified the card bios?

 

[Jayzilla]

mmm... have you tried without connecting the power cable to the card and see if the card bios flashes the warning message?

Have you modified the card bios?

I got the warning on the top screen once last week because I did plug in all the way. But since then there is no post.
Here are the list I've tried so far:
-6 pins power plug.
-No power plug.
-Different power plug.
-2X molex power plug.
-Half way in to the board just to see the warning sign (no sign).
-Take off the cooler and put a lil more thermal paste.

No mod had been done for the part.

All before these I dissembled the cooler and RAM sink to measure the water block size and put everything back in. I didn't got into the Windows with my Biostar board. I assuming it is works because I can see the BIOS. I'm exhausted of trying. I was going to start a work log blog because I got all the primary parts except the water cooling stuff. I didn't have any updates because I'm trying to get the card work. What else I could try while waiting for the new board? I'm crossing my fingers and toes and my balls for this.

 

[TRWOV]

I can't think of anything else really. Does the motherboard posts? Does the card fan spin?

 

[TRWOV]

Jayzilla, what happened? Did you get the 3850 to work?



On a related note, I just got a QX6800 ES Hopefully it will remain 100% stable at 3.24Ghz (my QX6700 does 3.24 but Crysis 2 always crashes it)

 

[Jayzilla]

Jayzilla, what happened? Did you get the 3850 to work?



On a related note, I just got a QX6800 ES Hopefully it will remain 100% stable at 3.24Ghz (my QX6700 does 3.24 but Crysis 2 always crashes it)

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/9756/img0284lg.jpg

I got the another board from EBay but I haven't got time to try it out yet. I've travelling and buying parts lately. Boxes are all over the place. I have lots of hope for this board. I will not give up this project even If I have cancer. Updates/work log will be up later next week.

Are you going to lap that processor? I wonder how much better in benchmark with that CPU.

 

[TRWOV]

nah, I don't know, the chip seems to be a dud. It couldn't pass my stress test at stock settings (100 IBT max loops). It failed on the 82th loop.

I'm going to lap it later to see if that helps

 

[Jayzilla]

nah, I don't know, the chip seems to be a dud. It couldn't pass my stress test at stock settings (100 IBT max loops). It failed on the 82th loop.

I'm going to lap it later to see if that helps

So how was your new chip running?

The card suddently works after countless hours of trying. I tried to switch all the componemts. Sometime my board is not turn on at all. My frustration went up after the new board doesn’t post at all. I don’t care anymore because I got it working…for now. I got electric shocks many times from my Zotac PCI’s card through the DVI cable.

The mother board problem could be my PSU or this:

I need a new board anyways. The color of my old one is going out.

Anyways. A complete Zotac PCI benchmark scores are here.

GT520 PCMark05: 7081. Graphic: 1441. 3DMark05: 2382. 3DMark06: 1411. 3DMark03: 6399. Novabench: 606
GT430 PCMark05: 7181. Graphic: 1524. 3DMark05: 2452. 3DMark06: 1489. 3DMark03: 6944. Novabench: 606
GT430 (big card) FTW.

On Vista Home 32Bit 3DMark Vantage. The score is more different but not day and night.

PPU ON CPU: GPU1: 14.08. GPU2: 16.67. CPU1: 1540.19. CPU2: 19.73 (E6111)
PPU ON 520: GPU1: 14.06. GPU2: 16.58. CPU1: 1543.87. CPU2: 35.68 (E6259)
PPU ON 430: GPU1: 15.63. GPU2: 18.46. CPU1: 1519.41. CPU2: 37.52. (E6901)
GT430 FTW
Obviously PhysX is better on the Zotac cards than CPU, but in FluidMark there is a different story.

GT520: Multicore on. Global score: 24. Force CPU checked- Global score 50
GT430: Multicore on. Global score: 23. Force CPU checked- Global score 41

Is that mean the CPU process PhysX better than the cards? GT520 is the winner in here.

The HD3850 will not work on Vista. Same issue as W7. So I can't test the cards on hybird mode and I haven't try on XP either.

I am cleaning my desk and get ready for the work log.

 

[Jayzilla]

HD3850 with full-covered water block

It takes me awhile to get the block. Been busy with school and stuff. I'm here to announce all the HD3850 water blocks will fits your AGP version, but I'm not sure anyone still care about it. The only down site about the Zalman blocks are aluminum. I need the copper one. It has fixed 3/4 fittings. I need 1/4 for my project. So I'm not going to use this block. I'm ordering the EK block. Am I the first one in here posting the water block?

I'm getting lots of sponsors for my ultimate AGP system project. It will be up soon. It gonna be epic work log.

TRWOV. I'm going to put you on my "Special thanks" page.

Cheers

 

[TRWOV]

Nice to see that you managed to hunt down one. Where did you find it?


Oh, and the QX6800 is running fine, I think that the dents on the heatspreader didn't allow the heatsink to make good contact.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

I have retired my AGP Q6600 HD3850 system. But good luck with your build! I can see you are having fun... I remember benchmarking and it was FASTER than an equivalent PCIe 3850 system. Early PCIe chipset days I guess.

I installed a gigabyte i-RAM with 4GB (4x 1GB) DDR. http://www.ebay.com/itm/GigaByte-iR...Disk_Drives&hash=item35bf1ad488#ht_873wt_1394 and http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25947

Even though (today) a software ramdisk is much faster than this SATA1 ramdrive, it is still an interesting option for an AGP build. Why? On an AGP system you are short of memory, with the 865PE(?) chipset limiting you to max 4GB DDR. And if you are running x86 then you are also constrained my Windows memory management, giving you just 2GB before /PAE etc.

So with a 4GB pagefile on the i-Ram drive, you get some pretty fast "paged" memory compared to HDD or even SSD. In fact, it worked so well, I had 2x of these devices in the system RAID 0'ed. I created 2x 4GB partitions. One exclusively for pagefile, and the other for temps, and manually pointed temp, web cache, winzip temps, etc. to it.

The system was pretty snappy.

If you are lucky, you sometimes see them going cheap on ebay... where a populated board essentially goes for the price of the DDR ram. If you have 4GB spare DDR knocking around, then it is worth $30-$50 just getting a board for the lolz.

WARNING - Those batteries on board tend to survive a power blip or reboot, but will not hold your data overnight if you power down the machine.

HERE IS A BENCHMARK of the i-RAM. Note that is it SATA1 constrained. So average read/write speeds max out pretty quick. However, random is fast compared to SSD. Note that these benchmarks are done on my new system not the AGP one. However, since the i-RAM is SATA1 constrained, the results will be pretty similar.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2528485&postcount=12
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156974

 

[TRWOV]

I have been eyeing those i-RAMs for a while but they are so expensive. One would thing they'd be $20 at this point like the Physx cards.

 

[Jayzilla]

Nice to see that you managed to hunt down one. Where did you find it?

Yeah. Been looking for a while. I got it new from fleebay. I was able to dissemble the fitting. If I manage to get the 1/4 at Home Depot. I might keep it, otherwise I don't wanna deal with corrosion in my cooling rig.

I have retired my AGP Q6600 HD3850 system. But good luck with your build! I can see you are having fun... I remember benchmarking and it was FASTER than an equivalent PCIe 3850 system. Early PCIe chipset days I guess.

Thanks. I retiring this AGP system by modding it to the first and last time. I can't wait to get it done.

I installed a gigabyte i-RAM with 4GB (4x 1GB) DDR. http://www.ebay.com/itm/GigaByte-iR...Disk_Drives&hash=item35bf1ad488#ht_873wt_1394 and http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25947

Even though (today) a software ramdisk is much faster than this SATA1 ramdrive, it is still an interesting option for an AGP build. Why? On an AGP system you are short of memory, with the 865PE(?) chipset limiting you to max 4GB DDR. And if you are running x86 then you are also constrained my Windows memory management, giving you just 2GB before /PAE etc.

So with a 4GB pagefile on the i-Ram drive, you get some pretty fast "paged" memory compared to HDD or even SSD. In fact, it worked so well, I had 2x of these devices in the system RAID 0'ed. I created 2x 4GB partitions. One exclusively for pagefile, and the other for temps, and manually pointed temp, web cache, winzip temps, etc. to it.

The system was pretty snappy.

If you are lucky, you sometimes see them going cheap on ebay... where a populated board essentially goes for the price of the DDR ram. If you have 4GB spare DDR knocking around, then it is worth $30-$50 just getting a board for the lolz.

WARNING - Those batteries on board tend to survive a power blip or reboot, but will not hold your data overnight if you power down the machine.

HERE IS A BENCHMARK of the i-RAM. Note that is it SATA1 constrained. So average read/write speeds max out pretty quick. However, random is fast compared to SSD. Note that these benchmarks are done on my new system not the AGP one. However, since the i-RAM is SATA1 constrained, the results will be pretty similar.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2528485&postcount=12
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156974

Cool stuff!!! So basically this card servers as a 4GB solid state drive? Or it will increase the amount of RAM in my system? Or both purposes? My AGP system will be running at 4 or 8GB of DDR2. I can put put this: http://techreport.com/r.x/corsair-xpert/temp-volt.jpg onto my board so I can have programmable LED banner!!

 

[TRWOV]

Cool stuff!!! So basically this card servers as a 4GB solid state drive? Or it will increase the amount of RAM in my system? Or both purposes? My AGP system will be running at 4 or 8GB of DDR2. I can put put this: http://techreport.com/r.x/corsair-xpert/temp-volt.jpg onto my board so I can have programmable LED banner!!

It's a 4GB SSD. As Jayzilla stated, it would work beautifully as a pagefile drive. I'm currently using an 8GB USB stick for Readyboost but I wonder what could I do with that.



Can't wait to see the log.

 

[Jayzilla]

It's a 4GB SSD. As Jayzilla stated, it would work beautifully as a pagefile drive. I'm currently using an 8GB USB stick for Readyboost but I wonder what could I do with that.



Can't wait to see the log.

Alright. This will be in my shopping list.

I know. You won't be disappointed. Cheers.

 

[TRWOV]

Any chance of you wanting to get rid of the Zalman waterblock? I think I got bitten by the AGP bug again. I think I'll pickup another HIS 3850 (the single slot one) and put the waterblock on that.

 

[Jayzilla]

Any chance of you wanting to get rid of the Zalman waterblock? I think I got bitten by the AGP bug again. I think I'll pickup another HIS 3850 (the single slot one) and put the waterblock on that.

I'll get back to you later today. I need to test out my photo hosting provider in here before I start the work log.

I hope it is view-able.

 

[Jayzilla]

Work log is up!!!!!

I know I've been talking too much, but there is 0 bullshit from me. I'm serious about the HD3850.

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=171535

Check it out. It is cool.

Any chance of you wanting to get rid of the Zalman waterblock? I think I got bitten by the AGP bug again. I think I'll pickup another HIS 3850 (the single slot one) and put the waterblock on that.

Once I got my cooling plans cleared out, I'll let you know. I can tell you this, there is big chance you will get this block from me for free!

 

[Jayzilla]

Updates

I haven't heard back from Gelid but I finally found a review that states the mounting spacing and it also has a diagram:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/gelid-icy-vision_2.html

I've made some preliminary measurements and it seems that it should fit the card nicely. The only thing I don't like a lot is that the fans are 2000RPM. In my experience, for 92mm a quiet fan must be around 1400RPM. I'll look into voltmodding them.



Got the QX6700 New benchmarks with QX6700 @ 3.24Ghz (270FSBx12) and HD3850 @824/1215/0.974v


3dmark06 12418 http://3dmark.com/3dm06/16460120

3dmark05 17327 http://3dmark.com/3dm05/5435472

3dmark03 37660 http://3dmark.com/3dm03/6459461

This was with a Q6700 2.66Ghz and 3850 @ 810/1251/1.254v
3dmark Vantage P5206 http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3796394

Is it's just me or Vantage is REALLY crash happy? I've seen the whole benchmark run ONCE. That result above was obtained after 5 crashes with my previous setup. I don't know how much the score scales with CPU speed but I'd guess my present config would get about 50 extra points because of the increased CPU speed (+600Mhz)

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/1748/cine64.png

UNIGINE Tropics benchmark (DX10)
http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/9858/tropics.png

The Last Remnant
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/5518/tlri.png

Final Fantasy XIV
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/1238/ff14.png

Resident Evil 5 Play Test DX10
http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/5464/re5a.png

Resident Evil 5 Fixed Test DX10
http://img546.imageshack.us/img546/5536/re5b.png

Street Fighter 4
http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/4063/sf4e.png

Lost Planet 2 Test A DX9
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6790/lp2a.png

Lost Planet 2 Test B DX9
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/245/lp2b.png

Monster Hunter Frontier Bench 3
http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5632/mhf1.png

Monster Hunter Frontier Bench 2
http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/5158/mhf3.png

Monster Hunter Frontier Bench 1
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/6421/mhf2.png

World in Conflict Very High 1440x900
http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/6844/wicl.png



http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/2241/img8408rl.jpg
http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/5654/img8410s.jpg

Hi man. You have QX6800. Do you have anymore updates on your benchmarks? I will have my work-log very soon.

 

[TRWOV]

hey Jayzilla, long time no see!

I haven't updated in a while because I haven't got higher scores. I decomisioned my AGP HTPC and installed the HD4670 on the rig, mainly for the 1GB of VRAM and the lower power consumption since I had to switch to a 450w PSU. I'm giving it one last pimping:

I also got an AM2NF3 board to play with Having some problems making it boot... question, did your board booted fine with the Phenom II X4 or did you have to use an AM2 CPU to flash the bios? My board came with the 2.50 bios and it doesn't want to post with my PII

 

[TRWOV]

Installed the 3850 on the QX6800 box and ran some marks:


Cinebench:

3dmark03 38288 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm03/6489181

3dmark05 18404 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm05/5476584

3dmark06 12315 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm06/17075086

3dmark vantage P5423 http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/4505511

pcmark05 11938 http://www.3dmark.com/pcm05/3183708


I'm running a G0 now and it sure helps with stability and seems to have some performance enhancements over B3 as I get higher scores on cinebench and IBT at the same speeds.

 

[Jayzilla]

hey Jayzilla, long time no see!


I also got an AM2NF3 board to play with Having some problems making it boot... question, did your board booted fine with the Phenom II X4 or did you have to use an AM2 CPU to flash the bios? My board came with the 2.50 bios and it doesn't want to post with my PII

Yeah I heard you got the same board I have. I used a Sempron to update my BIOS. Others it wound't boot. 2.50 is the latest for this board right?

 

[Jayzilla]

Yeah I heard you got the same board I have. I used a Sempron to update my BIOS. Others it wound't boot. 2.50 is the latest for this board right?

New CPU, water cooled and a SSD ey. Nice. Did you run the benchmarks on W7? Or it is a glitch? Man, you have too many AGP systems, which one are you going to use to run deathmatch with mine?

 

[Jayzilla]

Oh. Let me guess. You are unable to get the score from PCMark04 right?

 

[TRWOV]

yup, something about not having WMP9 installed.