So yesterday I went and bought/built a new rig. I kind of do want to show off since it's my first computer in over 4/5 years, so I went for a beast.

ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe (beauty, it's got Wi-Fi and it lets me act as a wireless router)
Intel E8500 C2D, 3.16Ghz
4x1GB of 6-6-6-18 DDR3 at 1333Mhz
Seagate ES.2 500TB HDD
Sapphire HD 4870
I picked up a sweet case to boot and an alright 530W power supply.

About 1200-1300 CAD.

I'm gonna install Vista Ultimate later today when I'm done vLiting it. Then it's XP, OSX, and Fedora 9 in Virtual Machines.

My question is in regards to the VGA card. Would it be best to download drivers straight from SapphireTech or go through ATI? I've always gotten my drivers straight from nVidia before but I've heard from people it's best to use your manufacturer's drivers for as long as they support it.

Thoughts?

I'll post some benchmarks later, I'm curious to see how it runs. The system it's replacing is:

ASUS K8N-E deluxe
AMD Anthalon 3400+ 2.2Ghz (single core, yup)
MSI 5900XT
1GB Corsair DDR RAM, not sure on the timing but I'd guess 9-9-9-27 or maybe even a lot worse
160 GB standard 7200RPM drive

I can play Counter Strike: Source pretty damn well on my old rig, I'm curious to see what it'll look like on the new rig and try out some of the games from the last 2 years...

I was super impressed by the 500TB drive.
and I say was, as I googled it and found it to be 500GB .
Too bad, you had me going there.

Anyway , I googled your card and found this:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/589/13

where they said this:

A final trick: at this time Radeon HD 4870 will only run stable if you install Catalyst 8.6 drivers and a hotfix made available by AMD.

Dude, I have a 40 exabyte drive.
http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h319/wjs_23/eb-1.jpg

500tb is for bitches.

So I shouldn't give the 8.7 drivers a shot? Both Sapphire and ATI are advertising their 8.7 drivers now...I'm wondering if they managed to fix the problem, and maybe that website is obsolete...?

right, it probably is obsolete.

try them out.
It's not like you can't change them if you're not happy with them.

do some benchmarking to see which works better on your box, is my suggestion

Thanks. I hope to have some benchmarks up later so I can gloat some more

And yes, it really is 500TB. I _really_ like my porn

DDr3... you phail

DDR timings are tighter than DDR2 and DDR2 tighter than DDR3 so no

HEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPP!!!

Ok, so to recap, I tried installing Vista and it would hang.

ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe (wifi)
Intel E8500
OCZ OCZ3RPR13332GK DDR3 PC3-10666 1333 MHz Reaper HPC Edition (4x1GB)
Sapphire ATI HD4870
Seagate ES.2 500GB SATA HDD (connected as SATA 1 in the ICH10R connectors.

The ASUS express gate doesn't work. It boots, but when you click web/skype/etc it goes to load and hangs.

I tried booting vista all day and it would not work. I updated the BIOS to the latest version, played around with settings, etc, nothing worked. The boot would hang when the bar at the bottom starter scrolling.

I was able to get it slightly working by underclocking RAM to 800Mhz and leaving all other settings at default, however this would only get me 1 screen further and hang. Other OSes hung as well.

I am pretty sure the problem lies either with the HDD or the Memory, but I don't know what to do to fix it. Please help, I'm in need of setting this PC up.

Furthermore, I've heard that the HD4870 has issues with the fan spinning at low RPMs and causing overheating. Can I access the VGA BIOS and fix that? If not, how would I fix it?

Thanks for the help.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163

RivaTuner lets me manipulate my ATI GPU clock and fan speeds.

I apparently didn't have it on this computer (thought I did) , so I just downloaded it .
I've been using the catalyst panel for overclocking, but I don't remember that giving me control of fan speed like RivaTuner will.
I turned up the fan on my videocard until it was too loud, then backed it down to "barely can hear it".
It's now definitely faster than default.
This week I'm having freezing problems on my computer when I play older DVD AVI files.
I'll be curious to see if this GPU fan speed increase helps my problem.
.
.
edit: the fan increase didn't fix my issues.
my best bet, it seems, is to copy the problem AVI files from DVD onto the hard-drive, where they play without issues.
Not an elegant fix, but it works.

Use memtest to test out the ram. Google it, it's real easy to use. If you get errors, try testing just 1 dimm of ram in the various ram slots, then test the others.

Also, reformat the hard drive and reinstall windows.