Windows 7: ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review

yes, it certainly is a little gem. it's the first thing i install after my drivers. it can do so many things - full dynamic control of d3d and opengl settings, over- or under-clocking, fine fan speed control, hardware monitoring, custom shortcuts for each game...

i wholeheartedly recommend it to all ati card users - say goodbye to ccc for ever! (well nearly, i don't think att does fancy tv-out stuff, luckily i don't need it anyway. )

Hey guys,

Just got my MSI 5870 installed. I tried installing ATI Tray Tools but got the errors related to digitally signed drivers and Windows 7 x64 not allowing it. After googling I found the fix, downloaded DSEO (http://orestech.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/ati-tray-tools-with-Windows 7-rc-64bit/), and ran it as instructed to 'sign' the files atitray64.sys and atitray.sys but after rebooting, during startup, when windows goes to startup tray tools, my screen just goes blue (not BSOD blue but a purple/blue color) and freezes.

I removed tray tools and elected to just install the ATI CCC and everything works normally although I'd rather give tray tools I try instead.

hi A320, it could be that att doesn't support the latest 5xxx cards yet - the software is solely maintained by one guy, ray adams.

he does get around to adding support for new cards, you gotta keep visiting the forum to see if he has...

oh, and you don't need to bother with the dseo - ati tray tools works quite happily without the unsigned driver, at least it has done on all the win 7 x64 builds i've tried to date...

From what Maximum PC said, this card is smoking hot, while consuming less power than similar cards that it outperformed and it only pulls down about 27 watts of power when doing things like your desktop and such. And at less than $400 for that much card, it seems like a great deal.

That makes sense I guess, but as for tray tools working happily, it won't in my case, but again that may be like you said, nothing to do with digitally signing the program, but just that it is not supporting the new cards yet.

Thanks, I guess CCC for now.

PS - this card is freakin awesome!

PPS - on a side note, since this card, my mouse cursor unexpectedly just goes big on me while working in windows. It's starting to piss me off, anyone know wtf??? It's a microsoft sidewinder

Hi,

It's either a setting in ATI CCC somewhere. Zoom cursor something,

or it's in the mouse settings, but I suspect it's ccc.

Good luck finding it.

I found the answer in another thread and it appears this is a common glitch among many users of this card and windows with no real fix yet.

i too was suffering from the enlarged mouse. didnt get the video crashes. The secondary display port on radeon 5870 (probably other 5*** models too) is faulty due to drivers failing to parse correctly. this seems to be isolated to the secondary display port only, as i've yet to see it happen on Port 1. personal experience only.

my fix was: Use 1 monitor. Use the top port (in my case anyway). out of sight out of mind.

if you are using dual monitors, gotta wait for a fix. i have CCC 10.3 and still persists. tried 9.12 and 10.2 hotfixes.

not really a fix, but temporary acceptable solution.

its crap with all the 5-series because you cant set specific automatic fan speed
yet msi afterburner can

I've installed the Asus ATI 5870 and I'm pretty psyched about it. The utils that came with it allow for manual fan speed, automatic or temperature limit rpm settings... I just have it on auto...
I'm running 2 LCDs and a through-the-sheet-rock connect to my HDTV for Hulu etc. No problems yet for games / productivity. What puzzled me for a while is that my 1st Win 7-64 install showed a 7.4 Windows Experience for graphics. My latter installs have been showing 6.0... a huge drop. I haven't noticed any change... just the numbers on WEI... I read later on 7forums that those number have a tendency to change, and that its best to disregard them anyhow.

Updated:
I've managed to get the WEI index back up to 7.8.
New ATI 790FX drivers did the trick.