MSI R3870X2 Quick user guide

MSI Features

MICRO-STAR INT'L MS-V803

Macrovision Corporation Product Notice

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* All trademarks used in this manual are the sole property of their respective owners.

VGA is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.

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Pentium is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation.

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Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

CAUTION!!

Do not force the GPU cooler against the fragile GPU to avoid

damage to the GPU.

Under the European Union ("EU") Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, Directive 2002/96/EC, which takes effect on August 13, 2005, products of "electrical and electronic equipment" cannot be discarded as municipal waste anymore and manufacturers of covered electronic equipment will be obligated to take back such products at the end of their useful life.

TEL. 886-2-32345599

FAX. 886-2-32345488

http://www.msi.com.tw

WARNING!!

DO NOT touch the cooling system since it may produce a certain heat while processing tasks.

G52-V8032XE

January 2008

Installing MSI Live Update

MSI Live Update offers you with brand-new update service experience, which can significantly save your time while searching files. MSI Live Update is capable to automatically analyze and list drivers, BIOS, and utilities you need. With the easy-touse updating approaches, you can increase the performance of your system easily and quickly. Follow the instructions below, with a few mouse clicks, you can acquire the related files for the system updating.

Installing from the Disk

1. Insert the supplied disk into the CD-ROM drive, and start the Setup program.

2. Click the Utility tab on the setup screen.

3. Click the MSI Live Update. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

Installing from the MSI Web Site

1. Link to MSI's website at http://www.msi.com.tw

2. Find and click Live Update Online on the left side of the web page to enter MSI Download Center.

3. Click Start to Check to download the Live Update application.

4. Click Install the continue.

5. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

6. Launch MSI Live Update and to enter the main page of this utility as shown here.

Using MSI Live VGA Driver Update

This service enables you to update the latest VGA driver for your VGA card.

1. To update the MSI Live VGA Driver , click Live VGA Driver item on the left column of the main page.

2. This utility will start checking your platform and the information on the VGA card, and display the information in a list.

3. Click the graph button on the bottom to connect MSI Live Update Series Server. Then, it will automatically connect the Internet and compare the version of the driver in the database.

4. It may take several minutes to detect the required drivers. Please wait while proceeding detection.

5. Click the InstallShield Wizard button on the right side of the table to download and update the driver. All actions will proceed automatically.

6. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the updating procedure.

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Using MSI Live VGA BIOS Update

This service enables you to update the latest VGA BIOS for your VGA card.

1. To update your VGA BIOS, click Live VGA BIOS item on the left column of the main page.

2. If your VGA card does not support the Live VGA BIOS function, you will receive a warning message on the screen.

3. If your VGA card do support the Live VGA BIOS function, please pay attention to the message shown on the screen telling you that in what circumstance flashing BIOS may fail to reboot.

4. Click Yes if you would like to try it at your own risk or No to return to the main page with everything unchanged.

5. If you click Yes to continue, it will check the information and BIOS version of your VGA card, and list them in a table.

6. Click the graph button at the bottom to connect the MSI Live Update 3 Server.

7. The MSI Live VGA BIOS will automatically connect the Internet and search the supported

8. If it has found one (or several) supported BIOS for your VGA card, click the InstallShield

9. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the updating procedure.

Note that the SDK of OD5 or OD5+ is not available for BIOS live updating currently. The latest news and Live Update function will be released on MSI web site.

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BIOS in the database of MSI .

Wizard button on the right side of the table to have the new BIOS downloaded and updated automatically.

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R3870X2 series

Overview

Note: The VGA card shown here may vary from the actual card. For further information, please visit MSI website at www.msi.com.tw

** Refer to the section of Enabling HDMI Output to enable the HDMI function.

Fan Connector

Power Connector

1G DDR3 memory

PCI Express Interface

Dual ATI Radeon HD3870

CrossFire Interface

TV_Out Connector (S) HDTV-Output integrated

DVI-I Ports

- HDMI supported**

- Dual dual-Link DVI output supported

Getting Started

Unpacking

Please check out the following items to make sure that you get the complete product: VGA card Disk: Drivers, documentation, and applications Consult your dealer immediately if anything is missing or damaged.

System Requirements

To install the VGA card, your computer system needs to meet the following requirements:

Intel Pentium III (and above), AMD K7 (and above), or compatible with expansion slot 1G of system memory Installation software requires CD-ROM drive Operation System Support: visit MSI website for further information Power supply of 550 (and up) watt is highly recommended for system stability For DVI-HDMI adapter, please visit http://ati.amd.com/ to get the compatible mainboard

information.

Card Features

666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process

PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface

256-bit GDDR3 memory interface

OpenGL 2.0 support

Ring Bus Memory Controller

Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes

Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support

Shader Model 4.1

32-bit floating point texture filtering

Indexed cube map arrays

Independent blend modes per render target

Pixel coverage sample masking

Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders

Gather4 texture fetching

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

- 320

128-bit floating point precision for all operations

Command processor for reduced CPU overhead

Shader instruction and constant caches

Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle and up to 128 textures per pixel

Fully associative multi-level texture cache design

DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression

High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)

Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs

Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer

Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear

Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)

Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)

8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support

Physics processing support

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For reference only

stream processing units

Getting Started

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

High performance vertex cache

Programmable tessellation unit

Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification

Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Anti-aliasing features

Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)

Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality

Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling

Temporal anti-aliasing

Gamma correct

Super AA (ATI CrossFire configurations only)

All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features

2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)

128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering

Bicubic filtering

sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)

Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)

Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support

Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology

Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs

Integrated compositing engine

High performance dual channel bridge interconnect

ATI PowerPlay

Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings

Performance-on-Demand

Central thermal management - on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform

Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats

Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration

ATI Avivo Video Post Processor

HDMI output support

Two integrated DisplayPort output supports

Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs

Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs

Two independent display controllers

Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder

MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding

Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

VGA mode support on all display outputs

Enabling HDMI Output

Follow the steps to enable HDMI Output function:

1. Find the DVI-to-HDMI adapter that comes with the package, if provided. is not provided.

2. Attach the

3. Ensure that the adapter is firmly installed.

below

Consult your dealer to purchase the adapter if it

DVI-to-HDMI adapter to the DVI connector.

Quick Installation

Hardware

below

expansion

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please follow the steps below:

Tip : If, on your computer, the Autorun program does not execute automatically, please 1) enable the CD-ROM drive Auto-detect function from Control Panel; or 2) find and run the setup.exe file manually from the CD.

Follow the steps to install the VGA card:

1. Remove the computer case.

2. Locate the expansion slot on your mainboard. Warning: Inserting the VGA card into a wrong slot may damage your card (refer to your mainboard manual for more Information).

3. Put the card directly over the slot and press one end of the card into the slot first. Gently but firmly press the other end until the card is fully seated in the slot.

4. Secure the card with a bracket screw.

5. Install all other cards and devices and connect all the cables, and then install the case.

6. Connect the monitor. Now, you are ready to install the software on your computer.

Software

To install the driver of the VGA card to your computer,

1. Turn on the computer.

2. Insert the into the CD-ROM drive. The Autorun program will start the Setup program, and show the setup screen as follows:

Installing MSI Live Update 3

3. Click ATI VGA Drivers. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

4. After finishing the installation, restart the computer as instructed.