Artefacts on a Power Color AIW 9800 SE

[Tan DJ]

Hi,

I have a PowerColor AIW 9800SE.

Naturaly, when I heard that there was a softmod driver available to activate the 4 inactive pipelines, I downloaded it to try it out.

Unfortunately, when running the softmod driver, I was getting artefacts - very noticable in the racing car movie in the Catalyst Control Center, and some of my other programs also had triangles appearing on the screen. Also, several times the GPU crashed, so I went back to using the original ATI driver.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my 250w power supply failed. Now as I was already aware that my Video Card documentation said that I needed at least a 300w psu, I purchased a 450w PSU.

For some reason, I decided to try the softmod driver again, and now with the 450w psu, I cannot create any circumstances where I see artefacts.

Is it possible that the artefacts I saw when I first tried the softmod driver were caused by the graphics card trying to draw more power than the 250w PSU could deliver cleanly and not by faulty pipelines?

Regards,
Tan DJ

[zekrahminator]

It's very possible, and it happens all the time. Which is why most people in the modding community invest in giganto-PSU's with outlandish wattages :p. There are tons of threads all about artifacting super cards, and all of them are resolved with a brand new $200 power supply.

[Tan DJ]

So with 4 pipelines running off a 250w psu, things were probably barely OK, but once I doubled the number of active pipelines, this would have doubled the power draw and poor old power supply just couldn't cut it. So if none of the things that produced artifacts before produce artifacts now, then I've probably got 8 good pipelines:cool: and double the video performance. Don't think I'm ready yet to try overclocking.

[stealthfighter]

Yeah that 250W probally did it. I would'nt expect to get all ur stuff running on 250W -- wouldan't even try it...