9700 Help. Hard locks even with new drivers.

[MysticLlama]

I got myself a 9700 after all of the rave reviews and everyone saying that the drivers were better, but now I'm having driver issues with it.

I can't play BF1942 for more than about 10-20 minutes before it hard locks, and I'm using the drivers that are supposed to fix that problem. (6178)

Is there anything else I could be missing? I was very careful to completely uninstall the nVidia stuff the best I could, but I did install the 6166s before I knew about the newer ones.

Does anyone else have issues like this?

Full system specs:
Epox 4G4A+
P4 2.66 @ 3.0 (150fsb)
AGP/PCI Locked
Corsiar 3500+ memory at 187.5mhz (DDR375)
ATi 9700Pro
Adaptec AAA-131 SCSI RAID Card
3x 15k 36.4GB Cheetah drives
Pioneer IDE DVD-ROM
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
2x 3Com 3xp Server NICs
550w Enermax Power Supply
Lian-Li PC-60

 

[Tates]

Try the 6193's

 

[BFG10K]

I notice that you're overclocking your system so obviously the first place to start would be to run everything at stock speeds.

In addtion make sure you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for your system and make sure you have the latest beta drivers from ATI which contain a number of fixes for Direct3D games such as BF1942.

 

[MysticLlama]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that, it does the exact same thing at stock speed as well.

I've also never overclocked the vid card or anything, and the CPU will go higher, but 3.0/150 is a nice round number so I leave it at that since it's a little warm anyway with the intake air passing through the 15k drives and all.

I haven't yet tried the BIOS update yet, I'll give that a shot tonight, it hadn't occured to me, though I have had to do that a lot with other systems in order to get RAID cards (which are way more particular than they need to be) working.

Hopefully the 6193s will help me out.

 

[Wolfsraider]

i too recommend the 6193 drivers these fixed my problems too -your rig looks vaguely familiar hmmm...lol almost the same setup but mine is a bit weaker. i am running @3150 with no issues after the intel drivers and 6193 drivers

here are a few other things to try:

try settinf the agp in bios to 64 mb or less
power wire hooked up?
if so try moving it to a different molex connection.

if using intel did you load the intel application accelerator drivers etc...

the two i use are

infinst_enu

iata_enu

what agp setting are you using 4x or 8x some mobo only work in 4x ymmv

up to date directx

try dxdiag see if any problems in dxdiag(type dxdiag in run box hit enter test everything and read all for errors

hth
mike

 

[tenoc]

Remove 6166 and/or 6178 before installing 6193.

 

[fragusmaximus]

I'm having the same problems you're having. I've been doing some research on it. Here's a quick summary of my system I put together nearly 60 days ago. I am not overclocking anything!

P4S8x w/ P4 2.4B (running latest BIOS and AGP4x)
512MB Corsair 2700 CL2.0
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (built by Radeon with the drivers included in wxp-w2k-radeon-6-13-10-6178.exe)
120GB Western Digital (SE)
Antec 1080 w/ 2 case fans, 1 blow hole and case fan, and 430W PS
Windows XP w/ SP1
DirectX 8.1 as installed from UT2003 disks


http://www.planetunreal.com/ut2003 mentions the following fix to force UT2003 to use OpenGL instead of D3D renderer:

Modify UT2003.ini from:
[Engine.Engine]
RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=Engine.NullRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

replacing these lines with the following:
[Engine.Engine]
;RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=Engine.NullRenderDevice
RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice


These lines look similar but check the semicolons. Obviously they're comment indicators.
I have not tried this yet so I don't know if it works.

http://www.ina-support.com/faq/ut2k3_pc.asp#lockup says the Radeon 9700 Pro is overheating. I'm a little lost why this would be the case since I have a lot of fans circulating the air inside the case. But anyway, they say to 'Turn off "Detail Textures", "Decals" and "Dynamic Lighting" on the Video tab of the Settings menu'. Again, I haven't tried this yet. They also 'recommend using the version 7.76, or Catalyst 2.3 drivers as they incorporate fixes for running Unreal Tournament 2003'.



Just throwing out ideas...
I hope one of these will be helpful. If I find one that works for me tonight, I'll let ya know.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

good luck, I can't even make it that far with even the new 7.79 beta drivers from germany. I think It may have something to with the fact that I'm running win98se while waiting for winXP that I bought on a microsoft promo. $50 is nice but is a 6-8 week wait worth the $250 I saved? the game loads, but everytime I load ANY map it locks up, EA will not respond to me on this, I've tried 10-15 e-mails, still haven't gotten a response. unless I absolutely love the game when the 1.2 patch comes out and I have winXP I probably won't be buying anymore software from EA just because the won't return on tech support. And I even registered the stinkin game.

Fresh install on this system

350W sparkle ps
msi kt4vl(kt400)(8x-agp drivers not available for win98)
Athlon 2000+retail w/retail hsf
1GB pc 2700 dl2 kinston (I only let win98 use 512MB for the swap file to work right)
80GB WD SE 8MB cache
Sapphirre Radeon 9700Pro
el-cheapo 56k fax-modem (that I may never use)
everything else I use is onboard the mobo
nothing ever oc'd.

 

[fragusmaximus]

I tried out the fixes last night. Turning off the "Detail Textures", "Decals" and "Dynamic Lighting" on the Video tab of the Settings menu didn't do much for me. Although UT2003 ran with fewer crashes, it still crashed. So I used the fix to force UT2003 to use OpenGL instead of Direct3d. This seemed to do the trick for me.

Conclusion? IMHO, the Radeon 9700 Pro doesn't work well with DirectX8.1 (specifically Direct3D). I'm looking forward to DirectX9. I hope things play better with that version.

I know this thread's original question was for BF1942, but I think we have similar problems so I hope my findings help in some small way.

 

[MysticLlama]

Thanks for all the help so far everyone.

Right now I'm sitting with the 6193s. When I first installed them my machine crashed within the first 30 minutes of playing the game, but after a reboot I made it the rest of the night (2-3 hours).

Normally I'd go off about sucky drivers, but I remember when I first started using GeForce cards with WinXP, that wasn't pretty at all. I must have gone 3 months using ctrl-alt-del -> end task to close CS because it would crash if I went to exit. (One thing that I never understood, but just dealt with)

Since there has been some improvement with the new ones, I'm hoping that the newer ones yet will solve it.

Also, even with the older drivers it did seem to last longer when I had Aniso and AA off, so that leads me to think that it may all be resolved in the drivers eventually.

Here's to trying to be patient......

 

[WyteWatt]

MysticLlama i don't have a ATI 9700 pro but i do have a Leadtek GF4 ti 4400 and i was having hard lockups and freezes in the game Spiderman the Movie. The way i fixed it was turning the sound card hardware acceleration setting from all the way up to all the way down. Yes the sound did still work but it did fix the issue. It sounded the same but fixed my problem in that game. See if that will help you any if you want. It may. By the way i have a Santa Cruz sound card too. I mean its worth a try. I don't think this is a ATI or Nvidia issue. I think its something else but not sure what it is. I always had to change OSs to fix a few problems. Not sure why. Someone else i heard from said he or she had to do the same thing. I really wish i could go back to my fav. OS but i may try to again. I spent about a month trying to figure out what it was nonstop just about.