seriously, what are my options here? advice from someone who actually works for PCS!!

Iroquois Pliskin

Iroquois Pliskin

Enthusiast
Al.Neri said:
so what are my options in terms of consumer rights? I feel like I have been fobbed off to an extent by PCS customer support, and I'm coming to the end of my warranty window.
Click to expand...

Seriously... The HD 5970 is 3 years old, and I think it was sold as advertised at that time - Catalyst version 11 works with the GPU as intended. What's more, your issue only occurs in F1 2011 and TF2 to a lesser extent, and as you've said only started occurring recently, courtesy of AMD excellent driver support. /sarc

If it's a separate issue, as you've described it to be, then the course of action is to take it up either with Codemasters or AMD driver support.

I understand that PCS have to choose the hardware components to best suit the customers' purposes, so I guess in the future we'll be seeing a lot less of AMD products - everywhere.

P.S. I'm an independent entity in all of this.
 
A

Al.Neri

Super Star
who said my issue only occurs with F1 2011 & TF2?

I have stated in my previous threads that it is affecting other games.

the games I have noticed it on so far are F1 2011, FSX, microsoft flight, LA Noire, TDU2, AOE Online, napoleon total war, GTA4 + DLC (GTA4 was always iffy in terms of frame rate, but since I started getting the problem, it has been worse).

in the case of F1 2011, FSX MS Flight, LA Noire, the frame rates are being capped at 30, and they get lower and lower the longer the games are running.

I have already contacted AMD regarding this matter, and so far, they have not replied. if/when they do reply, I'm anticipating an email advising me to contact the manufacturer of my PC.
 
Iroquois Pliskin

Iroquois Pliskin

Enthusiast
Seeing that you still have a valid warranty covering most (all?) main components of the PC, you can RMA the card and let them test it in the games that you've specified with the latest official AMD drivers.

Crossfire issues on a dual GPU card is a serious problem, but that's AMD's incompetence. If it can't be fixed via software, a replacement is the only remedy, and I don't think another HD 5970 would suffice, since it is not an isolated case, so you may be lucky here.*

*Depends on the conditions of RMA policy. : D
 
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tom_gr7

tom_gr7

Life Serving
Wht brand card is it? powercolor? Can you email them? I first thought it sounded faulty, are both chips running at the right speeds during games?
 
L

LFFPicard

Godlike
The other thing to consider is your using fraps to test the FPS, this will almost straight away drop your FPS considerably compared to what you can achieve without it running.
Try testing it with command console in TF2 so your get the DEV FPS not fraps.

Also I had a similar issue with me previous PC and found the oddest of solutions, to test, check your Graphics card tab of GPU-Z and take note of the PCI-E speed. Restart your PC check it again, run a game and when the FPS drops check it again. I had a issue where the PCI-E slot would change between 16x and 8x instantly causing drop in performance.
The fix was to simply drop the voltage slightly in the bios. Granted it was a OC card I was using but it is worth checking your end.

Also as a note to the warranty, as you have reported the issue within your warranty and it is a ongoing issue, it should still be covered. If you get a RMA the new card shoudl be covered by a standard 3month warranty also incase any fault occure after the RMA and warranty expire.
 
A

Al.Neri

Super Star
LFFPicard said:
The other thing to consider is your using fraps to test the FPS, this will almost straight away drop your FPS considerably compared to what you can achieve without it running.
Try testing it with command console in TF2 so your get the DEV FPS not fraps.

Also I had a similar issue with me previous PC and found the oddest of solutions, to test, check your Graphics card tab of GPU-Z and take note of the PCI-E speed. Restart your PC check it again, run a game and when the FPS drops check it again. I had a issue where the PCI-E slot would change between 16x and 8x instantly causing drop in performance.
The fix was to simply drop the voltage slightly in the bios. Granted it was a OC card I was using but it is worth checking your end.

Also as a note to the warranty, as you have reported the issue within your warranty and it is a ongoing issue, it should still be covered. If you get a RMA the new card shoudl be covered by a standard 3month warranty also incase any fault occure after the RMA and warranty expire.
Click to expand...


fraps only causes a drop in frame rate for me when I am recording with it, I can have it running to log the frame count and it won't interfere at all. it's only when I actually start recording when it impacts frame rate. I have used the command console to check the frame rate and it verifies the results fraps produced.

I can live with the periodic drops in TF2, that is more of a mild annoyance than an ourtight game killer, as it is in all the other games where I am struggling to get above 25fps.

I have checked the PCI-E speed and it's exactly the same as it was before, PCI-E 2.0X16 @ x16 2.0 for both GPU's.

I don't really want to just RMA the card, I had a go at trying to get it out to clean it, and couldn't reach the clip holding it into the motherboard. I don't want to risk doing any damage, and I'd prefere to RMA the whole machine and let PCS get to the bottom of it.
 
tom_gr7

tom_gr7

Life Serving
Could it just be poor optimisation of GPU drivers?

You could try playing a well known game like Bf3? That should be well optimised due to being very popular, well i would think anyway.
 
A

Al.Neri

Super Star
tom_gr7 said:
Could it just be poor optimisation of GPU drivers?

You could try playing a well known game like Bf3? That should be well optimised due to being very popular, well i would think anyway.
Click to expand...

wouldn't that poor optimisation have been evident beforehand?
 
W

Wake

Silver Level Poster
When does your warranty run out?
Have you informed them by mail about this issue before?
Has the unit (whole PC) subject to RMAs before - if so, how many and when?
Have they had the unit on numerous occasions?
Read my Desktop tech issue post for SSD failure - then pm me - I can probably advise you what to do.
 
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