4870 Problem

Well I've been having some performance issues with my 4870 since I got it last week.

The card doesn't seem to preform as the other 4870's do.

It got a pretty low 3dmark06 score only about 10,000 which is low consider some cards are getting scores of 13,000-14,000 or more.

In call of duty 4 the frames per second rate (FPS) usually only stays at around 20-30 which doesn't make sense because all the other 4870s seem to be getting 70+ fps in this game.

I've tried just about everything and I still can't make the performance of this card to go up.
I've re-installed windows vista (I previously had and 8800GTS 640mb in my computer and I thought that the old Nvidia driver leftovers/settings were possibly causing the problem.) But re-installing everything didn't help.
Installed the latest hotfix drivers when I re-installed vista and no performance increase.
Tried that fan speed mod increased the fan speed to 70% and still no gains.
Tried resting the computers bios

Based on my results you would think that this card is being bottlednecked by some other hardware in the computer but that doesn't make any sense eather because my system

Intel Xeon X3360 @2.83GHZ
G.Skill 2 x2gb sticks @ 533mhz PC2 8500
800 watt OCZ Elite X Stream
ATI Sapphire 4870
Gigabyte-X48-DQ6, Thermalright-ultra 120 extreme, Aero extreme turbine fan
150GB SATA western digital raptor, 750GB SATA western digitial hd
windows vista home premium 64-bit

Shouldn't be bottlenecking the card. So i'm stuck with two decesions eather I wait for the new ATI drivers and hope that fixes the problem or RMA the card and hope the next one will preform better.

Hears the file.

Its also worth noting when I run ATI tool I get this strange message something about a kernel but I have no idea what it means and if it has any significance to the problem or is just random.

This information is very helpful I did not notice this before.

The video card is in the right slot on the X48 there are only 2 different types of pci-e slots the small ones are the pci-e 1x and the large ones are the 16x and this card is in the correct spot. Just before I re-installed vista I download all the latest hardware drivers for my computer so I don't think that is a problem. Its maybe a setting some ware in the bios or something I have to find.

I do have a PCI-E TV tuner card in the 1x spot that might be causing the problem in some way. I guess I'll have to do some more reasearch into figuring out how to run the card @16x.

Fixed the problem I was having got it to run at 16x.

I got tired of looking for a way to enable 16x on the forums/web so I just went and took the card and put the card into the 2nd pci-e 16x slot. After I started my computer up again I checked GPU-Z and 16x was enabled. I played a few games like call of duty 4 and got 70+ FPS in the game. But I did noticed my network drivers stopped working for some reason I tried to re-install them and they still didn't work. So I un-installed them again shut my computer off (Put the 4870 into the original spot it was in) turned the power switch off pulled the plug out for a few seconds then plugged it back in started the computer installed the network drivers and everything worked fine again. I should have looked at the network drivers in the first place because they seem to cause a lot of problems with new hardware and stop working for some reason.