I've had a 3870 in my comp for a while, and it worked pretty great considering my system only had about 1.5 gigs of ram.

Well recently I upgraded my system to 3 gigs of ram and did a clean install of Vista only to find abysmal performance. Using MSI Afterburner's overlay I found that the culprit was the fact that my GPU never goes above a 10% load. If anyone can help with this issue I'd appreciate it.

Motherboard: D945GTP vAAC97834-302
CPU: Intel Pentium D 3.80 GHz
RAM: 3 GB (2 1GB, 2 0.5GB, all Hynix Brand), DDR2, Dual Channel, 333.3 MHz FSB:DRAM=3:5
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 3870
PSU :Antech SP-500 http://www.antec.com/specs/SP500_spe.html
Monitor: Viewsonic VX1935wm-5
Hard drives: Western Digital WD2500JD
Optical Drives: HP GDR8161B
Additional PCI cards: Netgear WG311T w/ Atheros Drivers
Number of fans present: 1

Operating System : Windows Vista SP2
Video Card Drivers in Use ( and tried ): 11.12
Motherboard Drivers Used: BIOS? NT94510J.86A.3528.2006.0208.1102
Apps/Games causing issues ( and if they've been patched ): Tested with Skyrim, TF2, Minecraft. All up to date, all have the issue.
All major components check 100% after thorough testing ( eg. Memory & Memtest86 ): Ran memory Diagnostic, intel processor diagnostic, and Seagate HD Test, all passed.
System clean of viruses / spyware etc: Yes
Other things tried: Updates, moving ram around

EDIT: Added info as Gr33nGecko suggested

 

EDIT 2: The card does not seem to be raising above 300 MHz for some applications.

 

Edited: 12/27/2011 at 03:50 PM by Avocado

 

These are system specs, DXDiag dumps, MSSysInfo dumps are useless for the most part ..

Pre-Built PC Brand / Model if rig is a DELL/COMPAQ/ACER etc :


Or .. :


Motherboard:
CPU ( Brand / Model / Is the computer Overclocked, if so list CPU speeds, FSB, Memory speeds, Voltages etc. etc.):
RAM ( Brand / Model / Tell us the number of sticks and if you´re using different brands):
Video Card ( Brand / Model / Is it overclocked, and if so, to what speeds and using what utility ):
PSU ( IMPORTANT !!! Brand & Model / Link to webpage with specs / manufacturer's website or picture of unit label ):
Monitor ( Brand / Model / Connection used):
Hard drives:
Optical Drives:
Additional PCI cards:
Number of fans present:

Operating System :
Video Card Drivers in Use ( and tried ):
Motherboard Drivers Used:
Apps/Games causing issues ( and if they've been patched ):
All major components check 100% after thorough testing ( eg. Memory & Memtest86 ):
System clean of viruses / spyware etc:
Other things tried:

 

I have x3 HD3870s here and have gone through XP, Vista and W7 with them, with no issues at all with either the single card system, or my XFire based system .. ( apart from the obvious, that Vista was pretty cr4ppy ) ..

Fill in that list and maybe it'll shed more light on the issue. Oh, and how are you checking things with MSI-AB ? Logging to file or OSD or ALT-Tabbing out to check things ?

-------------------------
AM3 965BE C3 / 4GB Corsair XMS3 2000Mhz / GigaByte 990FXA-UD5 / Corsair H70 & 2 CM Excaliburs / x2 HD3870 ATOMIC Edition / Corsair 90GB Force 3 SSD / Momentus XT 250Gb Hybrid HDD / x3 Samsung F3 1Tb / Sony AD-7700 DVD-RW / Auzen X-Mystique / Enermax INFINITI 650W / Lian Li PC-7FNWB / Logitech X-530 / Logitech Kboard & MX620 Laser Mouse / Epson RX685 / DELL U2312HM 23" IPS TFT / MY RIG HERE

Okay I've formatted it like that. I've also tried rolling back the drivers to as far back as I could, about 8.10 but to no avail and since returned to 11.12

I ran a system benchmarking tool, Performance Test 7.0. It had a 3D test split into 4 or 5 parts. The first parts were ran in a window and got extremely high FPS(200-400), but the later parts were run fullscreen and maxed at around 15 FPS. Though running TF2 in windowed mode didn't seem to change anything.

Edited: 12/27/2011 at 03:43 PM by Avocado

Odd problems.

Do you have access to another computer you could try sticking the card in?   That way you can check if it is the Video card or something in the computer that is causing the issue.

If you can't figure it out, if you shop around ~$50 will get you a new Radeon HD5570 or HD6570 which will perform similarly to the 3870...  it's an old card now.   Things eventually fail.

-------------------------
Silverstone RV03 Case, Intel Core i7-3930K@4.6Ghz, MainGear EPIC 180 cooler, ASUS P9X79 WS, 16GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3-2000, 120GB OCZ Agility SSD, Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD, 2 Asus EAH6970 DirectCU II's in Crossfire, PLP Triple head setup.

Unfortunately I don't have a computer with the needed wattage. Is there any program I can use to see if it is the card failing?

This has to be software related. There's no way I can run PerformanceTest and get 600 FPS in the simple test, 300 FPS in the medium test, but 9 in a complex test. If the hardware was failing they'd all be abysmal.