Gigabyte Gv-r467zl-1gi Review its a graphics card

[truefusion 3]

Gigabyte GV-R467ZL-1GI

This card replaces an old XFX 8600 GT XXX edition that died on me (three capacitors popped—similar in sound to a balloon popping, only more high pitched). In comparison to the one it replaced, the 8600GT had 620mhz (factory overclocked), this one has 750mhz (not overclocked, though it can be); the 8600GT had 32 stream processors, this one has 320. It can play all of the games i have on their highest settings without any lag. As you can see on the image, it comes with a Zalman heatsink and fan—Zalman is a good choice. I have owned this card for a month and it is still kicking.

The box advertises longer capacitor life, which given my previous experience, is much preferred. While it doesn't have a 256-bit memory interface, i don't expect it to be much of a difference concerning performance, and with 1GB of GDDR3 RAM, i don't expect it to tax any of my other hardware. In trying to find some tools that test out the rendering capabilities of the card that are cross-platform, free, and that displays stunning scenery, i have found Unigine. It also allows you to take screenshots of what is being dynamically rendered.

Here are the ones i took under Linux with OpenGL: click.
Here are the ones from Windows and DirectX 9: click.

Temperatures are 10 degrees cooler than my previous graphics card, idling at around 40 degrees Celsius and somewhat over 55 degrees Celsius on load. This is likely due to the 55nm technology. In Windows in the Catalyst Control Center i can choose to manually control the speed of the fan if i wanted to.

Troubles and Troubleshooting

Unfortunately some problems i did run into, albeit they aren't necessarily the card's fault.

Linux

No problems under here, after you successfully install the drivers, that is. Personally, i'm a bit amazed that Ubuntu actually succeeded in doing away with the "xorg.conf" file normally located at /etc/X11. They had said they were going to do it, and they've done it. However, that, i believe, is one of the problems i ran into. In other words, after installing the proprietary ATI drivers, be sure to run this command:

CONSOLE

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

Windows

The ever so common "VPU recovery" error is quite annoying. [skip to solution] So far i have not been able to overcome this problem, but searching online shows that it isn't specific to any card and model. It's not an overheating issue, i am certain of it, and i don't expect it to be a faulty card issue. It is quite possible, however, that i may need a BIOS update, but i'm not going to bother with that. Other research suggests or implies that it is DirectX's fault—not sure if the card is backwards compatible with DirectX 9, since the card advertises DirectX 10.1. I have not been able to reproduce this problem in Linux; however, i can't say that there are any games (or benchmarks) out there for Linux that will work my gfx card out hard enough to experience a system crash or at least a "VPU recovery" error. It doesn't seem to be operating system specific (at least concerning the different versions of Windows), so i don't think it is the case that i am using DirectX 9-based games.

Other possibilities could be incompatible chipsets: that is, using a Nvidia based chipset (e.g. nForce) with an ATI graphics card. My motherboard doesn't have an AMD-based chipset, but if i ever do get one, i will surely report back (assuming i still own this graphics card and it is still kicking). Another suggestion was that the power-saving feature of the card causes the problem, but after using RivaTuner to force a constant 750mhz core clock, the crashes still occur. I hear UT2004 and Doom3 might be good benchmarks to test the card out, which, i believe, both games are available for Linux. I have downloaded Doom3 (it's free), but have been unable to run it due to, apparently, a missing configuration file. I'll see if i can get my hands on UT2004 or higher and try to reproduce the problem. If i do get it and the problem doesn't occur, then it is possible that it is a DirectX problem.

If it weren't for this problem, i'd rate this card 10 out of 10, but it gets a 7.7 out of 10.

[solution] I seem to have overcome the VPU recovery error by resetting my BIOS to a fail-safe setting (mode). I can now play for really long periods of time without any system crash or VPU recovery errors. I have not been able to figure out which setting in the BIOS exactly that was causing the problem, but it does not seem to be concerning my RAM. While this solution worked for me, it may not work for everyone, but now that i have overcome the problem, this card is awesome.

[iGuest 3]

What motherboard?Gigabyte Gv-r467zl-1gi Review

Keep us posted if you find anything else on this issue for Windows. I was having mass blue screen crashes, and then it stopped booting entirely (graphics card error beep), until I took it out, tweaked my RAM timings in the BIOS with another card in there, and re-installed.

Not sure if it was a RAM issue or the video card, but the card seems to be stable(ish) now, though I'm having some artifacting issues with Blu-Ray playback. I'm definitely noticing voltage and timing adjustments of the RAM are making huge differences in how stable the system are.

 

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5

RAM is 8gb G.Skill Trident F3-16000CL9D-4GBTD (2ghz running at 1.6ghz)

-reply by ioTus