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Ok, so I bought 2 5830's and have them crossfired on my main PC, and I bought a 5850 because the 5830s were sold out, and I put that alone on another PC. All are XFX brand.

So I am able to clock my 5830's to 1010 mhz and get about 300 mh/s, but when I tried overclocking my 5850, I could only get it up to 900 mhz and it kept crashing the computer and blue screening it. Then I started getting hard core artifacts, and finally it just died. I can no longer boot that computer, nothing is coming up on the screen.

After only 1 day, the 5850 is dead and I don't know why. The temps never got above 70* C.

I used ATI Tray tools to up the voltage, and TRIXX to up the clock rate.

Am I screwed? What's the deal with 5850s? I was getting 350 mh/s before it died on me, and it would be nice to have that again... Anything I can do?

Where did you get the 5850? Maybe you are eligible for a manufacturer or vendor warranty. You can try RMA with XFX.

It sounds like the card most likely had some existing hardware defect, but what voltage did you use with it? Voltage is definitely the most volatile setting for a card.

That is probably why. Also Xfx cards are not the best for overclocking.

But the 5830s are the same, and they have given me no problems  >:(


Amazon.com. I'll try to return it there.

Bugger.

more likely its because you do it wrong, ie: 1. overvoltage. 2. not provide decent airflow in case. 3. you PSU output fluctuation/brownout kill it.
also not infrequent is improperly repaired carsd,sold as new. they works, but not for long :[
hardly its brand-related, IMO.
and no, XFX-branded cards is okay, IMO. they not 1st echelon, right, but some players there do products better than 1st one, like [overpriced/overpromoted]ASUSTech, for example. they had good HRM for both design and production. same about rest smaller companies, like IceQ and etc.
if you supply exact part number i check my statistic, but again, nothing awful, XFX-related there, yet.

The 5850 puts out significantly more heat at the same clock so it's always been the case that you can't stably overclock them as high as 5830's could be clocked.  Based on the clocks you mentioned (900Mhz) and the fact that you're playing with voltage it's almost a sure thing that you cooked the 5850.

Temp readouts are notoriously inaccurate with video cards anyways and I find it pretty hard to believe you never went past 70 degrees just based on your description.  Not to mention even if the chip itself is staying cool enough the voltage regulators won't when you're overclocking and overvolting like that.  Unless you have serious cooling for all the VRMs and the GPU I wouldn't really recommend overvolting the 5850.

If I were you I'd probably just push it as far as it'd go at stock voltage without crashing.  It'll probably be somewhere in the low to mid 800's or so though a lot of people can't even hit 800.  Very unlikely to be worth the investment in cooling you'd need to overvolt and overclock the 5850 >900Mhz safely.  Check the overclocker forums too, you'll see that very few people hit the kinds of overclocks you're looking for and even if they do who knows how long the cards will last.

Some of the 5850's do have better cooling than the others too, but they tend to be more expensive so if you're looking for value for money it doesn't really make sense to pay that much more to get maybe 30Mhz more.