Video card diagnostics?

Are there any video card diagnostics i can run to make sure both my vid cards (5870's) are in working order?


thanks

 

Dells Diagnostics will test the cards including the video memory if you suspect an issue.

Benchmark programs will give you some indication of performance or lack of.

 

thanks Dave. I will run the bios diagnostics. I still can't figure out why my cards are stuttering while the fps counter displays 25-30fps.

this goes for vantage and heaven 2.1

edit: I will try and post a video of what's happening

 

The increased power draw when using two video cards can lead to throttling. Some M17x owners have had these issues with the earlier video cards but I haven't heard of any issues yet with the newer cards.

Try running ThrottleStop in monitoring mode as well as GPU-Z and you might be able to find a problem.

ThrottleStop 2.00
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip

 

Thanks uncle,

I'll try this when i get home

 

A major unresolved problem for the M17x-R1 when trying to use SLI mode is clock modulation throttling of the CPU. The bios starts this to reduce power consumption. Here's a big long thread investigating that issue.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/410440-m17x-stutter.html

Clock modulation should rarely if ever be used but Dell has been using it indiscriminately to control power consumption on a wide variety of their performance laptops including the XPS, Alienware and even their high dollar Precision series. The ThrottleStop log file will make this very obvious if they are throttling your system with this method.

You can upload the log file to www.sendspace.com or anywhere convenient and I'll have a look at it if you're not sure what it's telling you.

Hopefully your problem is something simple like an early driver issue. I wouldn't wish clock modulation issues on my worst enemy.

 

I seem to be getting a stuttering issue as well. i got my m17x on thursday with two 5870's. Currently on 3D Mark Vantage, when the get the splash screen for the second GPU test. I can see a black line flickering on the left side of my screen.

Along with this I seem to be getting flickering clouds and trees in the Crysis Demo.

 

This is not a hardware/power issue. The flickering you see is a general problem with the drivers. My 4870's have it from the beginning. I seriously suspect that absolutely all systems have those issues in Crysis and a few other games. This is something that has to be addressed by AMD not Dell.

 

By stuttering, i assume you mean choppy-looking fps while it is displaying 25-30? Well, that is most definatly micro-stuttering. I wouldn't mind too much about it, because you should be gaming >30 fps pretty much all the time.

 

Run GPU-Z while your running Vantage and have it log the Video card stats. Than after the run close it out and look at the log file to see where your video clocks are. Sounds like it could be the throttling.

 

Well I've owned an R1 with sli 280's and this "micro-stuttering" never occured. Most demanding games will dip below 30 fps too.

 

When my 5870 failed I did the diag that comes with the system and it passed all the tests but still got less FPS in games then my 8600mGT and left behind yellow around text in 2d environments and no matter which driver I used HWmonitor never picked up my GPU. There are many ways to tell if there is GPU failure or driver failure, but the dell diag program you can boot into is OK at best as it only seems to test the most basic stuff.