Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi,

I've got this screen flickering thing with my new MSI 7850 Twin Frozr III, it's just like a bit of screen tearing. It happens only while scrolling web pages and it's not always noticeable but when I set the clocks to 700 clock/800 memory the problem doesn't go away... Well, even if it did I'd be pissed anyway because setting the idle clocks to 700/800 has increased my idle temp from 37-40 C to 52 C which is ridiculous! It's really annoying because I shelled out for the card hoping that it would work perfectly well out of the box... Do you think that the card may be flawed? I didn't have any issues when playing games except when I overclocked it to 1 ghz which, as I thought, would be a doodle for this card but it responded with artifacting and messing up my audio after some time... I'm quite disappointed. I'd appreciate any suggestions from you guys.

. It happens only while scrolling web pages and it's not always noticeable but when I set the clocks to 700 clock/800 memory the problem doesn't go away... Well.

Recently I have had big issues with the 11.x drivers causing my non-primary display screens to flicker on the windows desktop a lot but never in game.
The flickering was often triggered by some sort of 2D animation, this could be as simple as scrolling down a webpage.

Using driver sweeper while in windows safe mode, I removed all the ATI drivers, rebooted and installed ati driver v10.6.
With driver 10.6 my screens no longer flickered on the windows desktop, even with overdrive enabled.
I noticed that the 2D clocks where at GPU=400MHz and Mem=1200MHz.

I decided to try and upgrade the drivers back to v11.6 again, using driver sweeper in windows safe mode to clear all of 10.6 series drivers.

Once the 11.6 drivers where instaled, I went back into ATI Overdrive and noticed that the 2D clocks where GPU=157MHz and mem=300MHz.

With Overdrive enabled on the newer drivers, my 3D clock settings would increase, but the 2D clocks would drop massively, causing my screens to flicker when in the windows desktop.

Here is some GPU-Z images for reference...

Image1: No drivers installed, no overdrive.


Image2: 10.6 drivers installed, overdrive enabled.


Image3: 11.6 drivers installed, overdrive enabled.


When using drivers 11.6 and ATI Overdrive was disabled, the 2D clocks would increase back up to the same as that of the 10.6 drivers@ 400/1200mhz.

Unfortunately the ATI drivers do not allow you to adjust the 2D clocks, even with overdrive enabled, so the way to fix this issue was to edit the profiles.xml file located in C:UsersAppDataLocalATIACEprofiles.xml

Open the file in a texteditor and search for the following lines...

These values are the 2D clock speeds and voltages that are used when Overdrive is enabled.
We need to increase these values to get rid of the flickering caused by these low speeds.

Change the values to the following...

Save the profiles.xml file and set it as read only.
Reboot your pc.
Now when using ATI Overdrive you can still achieve the higher 3D clock speeds and maintain a stable desktop with more reliable 2D clocks, using GPU=400MHz and Mem=600MHz, I had also increased the VDDC voltage from 0.950- to 1.063.

Here is the 11.6 drivers with ati overdrive enabled after the fix detailed above.


Some of you may also notice the difference in amps the card draws when changing the clock settings.
With the 2D clocks at 400/600mhz, the card appears to draw only 4.4amps, compared to 12.5amps when ati overdrive is disabled running at 400/1200mhz.