TGSMRG

Greetings all,

I'm brand new here and while looking for some drivers over at OmegaDrivers.net, I decided to join the forums to see if I could find some answers to some of the questions I have in regards to my new 6800 Ultra.

Up until last week I had used a Radeon 9800 that I soft-modded to "Pro" since the 9800 (NP) first came out. Well my brother-in-law was given a new 7800 GTX from a rich friend and so he sold me his 1 year old EVGA 6800 Ultra for $100. I was stoked.

So my questions are:

1) Whats the normal temp the card should run at? At idle it's around 55-61 C. Under load it gets to about 70+ C. Is that normal? The Temp bars off to the left in the Control Panel are in the Yellow. I installed a new custom cooler HS+Fan asm. & there was zero difference.

2) In NFS:MWBE I get artifacts. Not all the time, but enough for it to be noticable. At different times parts of the screen will flash white. Such as when i'm driving, a telephone pole will flash white, or a car I pass will flash white, very quickly & on different parts of the screen. Is this perhaps a driver issue? I have the newest Forceware drivers from nvidia.com installed & first used the Cat-uninstaller app to remove all traces of the old Cataylst drivers. This issue did not happen with my 9800 Pro.

3) The listed Omega drivers on the site are almost a year old. Has there been any updates to the forceware drivers? (None that I could find other than the 66.93.)

A little background, my current PC, while no longer cutting edge, still packs enough punch to play games like F.E.A.R, NFS:MW & HL2 @ 1024x768 smoothly on my old 9800 Pro, so it's not a simple matter that I don't have enough RAM or my hardware drivers are not current because I do & they are. Sorry for the noobish questions, i'm just new to nVidia video cards. Been with ATI since...well forever.

Thanks in advance for any & all help.

-MRG

fobis

1.) Those temps look fine, but I'm no expert on 6800U's. All I know is that they ran HOT. So you're probably okay if the temps don't even drop with different aftermarket coolers.
2.) That does kind of sound like artifacting, but I suppose it could be a driver issue. Does your card artifact in other games that are graphically intensive? If not, then it's probably just a driver-game issue.
3.) Omega hasn't updated his Forceware sets since that set and there are no plans to at this moment. Kind of a shame, but you can always try the DHzp drivers.

And also, just using the Catalyst uninstaller won't remove your ATi drivers completely, you have to also use DriverCleaner Pro to clean out trash entries and stuff left over. Try that, as well.

Hope this helps,
-fobis

__________________
MacBook Pro
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz
2GB DDR2-677
ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
120GB 7200RPM SATA HDD

TGSMRG

Thanks Fobis for your response!

I had heard that the 6800U's ran hot. One of the many conditions that I heard was fixed on the 7800's. As for my artifact problem, I found my error. (I think) Because I was bored, I swapped everything over from my old tower to a new one and in doing so I replaced the retainer plate from the new cooler on the 6800U with the old one so that it was secured better in the AGP slot. The old retainer plate was held with one screw and it was slightly loose in the AGP slot. With the old retainer, it is secured with 2 screws and so is no longer loose.

Anyways, thanks again. I'm off to reinstall F.E.A.R to see how it looks and runs on the 6800U.

-MRG