Hi guys, I'm new here, I was hoping that you could help me out with a problem I've been having.

I bought a Gainward 4850 GS on eBay recently. Upon installing the card I ran GPUZ and Rivatuner, both of which told me the card was running at stock 4850 speeds i.e. 625mhz core clock and 993mhz memory!

The card is definitely the Golden Sample model as it has the visible heatpipes (copper colour) and the 8pin connector rather than the standard 6pin.

I decided to flash the bios with version# VER011.008.000.000.000000


This appeared to fix the problem and it is now running at 700mhz clock and 1100mhz memory. I can run Furmark stability test with MSAAx8 with no crashes. Temperatures are 36c idle and 55c load.


COD4 runs fine, as do other games. However when running Empire Total War, my screen sometimes goes completely blank and monitor displays 'no signal' message before turning off. When this happens, the only thing I can do is a hard reset - holding the power button down for 10secs.

What do you think the problem is here, have I used the wrong bios? Is the card faulty? Is there a fix?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Other system specs:

Q6600 running at 3.2ghz stable
4gb 1066 OCZ RAM
Corsair 550VX PSU
Asus P5Q-PRO Motherboard
WD Caviar Black 1TB HDD

Haha, I had no idea about the switch!

Ok, put the old bios back, and put my CPU back on standard.

Problem still happens, also ran Furmark for 6 hours and it happened in that as well. Seems to be only very graphically intensive things that make it happen.

Very annoying, have read through the other threads on the old fourm about this and I guess its part of the faulty first batch. Am returning to seller.

Thanks for the help. Need to look for a new card now!