ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe and Sapphire X700 card crash 3Dmark 2005...Need help

[Amurtigress]

Hello,

I have had several years of experiences in PC hardware, and never thought I'd get stuck like this. I changed from a ASUS P4C800-E based system to a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard with Athlon 64 3000+ CPU (Newcastle core). Everything runs reliably, memtest86 and six hours of Prime95 stress test showed no errors. Neither do halflife 2, UT2004 and Need For Speed Underground 2.

However, 3DMark 2005 crashes with a black screen immediately when getting to CPU test 1, and restarts the system after a few seconds.

After the reboot the Event Log shows error number 108. ati2mtag.sys was stuck in an infinite loop.

Here comes what I've tried to solve the problem, yet changed not a thing so far:

Changing the OS. Tried: Win2003 Server, Win XP SP1, Win XP SP 2, WinXP 64 bit beta.

Drivers: Catalyst 4.9, 4.12, 5.1 through 5.3. Some modded DNA and Omega drivers.

NForce 4 chipset drivers: 6.39, 6.53

BIOS versions of the board: 1006, 1007 beta 3

Changing PEG Link modes to everything that was available

Flashed a new BIOS on the card, but had to return to the original one due to rendering errors.

RAM: Dual and single mode tested, with 512 MB, 1 GB and 1.5 GB (1.5 GB with 2x Twinmos 512 MB and 2x Infineon 256 MB PC400)

Overclocked, underclocked, standard clocks. No change in the error. I was trying to get this problem eliminated for half a week now...Anybody having an idea?

My hardware:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard
Athlon64 3000+ Newcastle CPU
2x512 MB Twinmos PC400 DDR RAM in dual channel mode
Sapphire X700Pro Hybrid graphics card with 128 MB GDDR 3 RAM.
Enermax power supply with 460W, 12V/33 Ampere, 5V/35 Ampere. Sufficient according to the mobo's manual.

If you need to know more to help, just let me know.

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[GuitarDaddy]

It sounds like some sort of conflict between 3Dmark05 and the ATI card. I would try reinstalling 3Dmark05

If everything else is working fine, I wouldn't worry too much. It's a pretty cool benchmark (I ran it a bunch the first few weeks), but it is just a benchmark and beleive me it gets old pretty quick. I uninstalled it a couple of months ago

Just game your brains out! And don't worry about it.

 

[Amurtigress]

Guitardaddy,

thanks for your reply. My biggest concern is actually if there might be a deeper problem with the hardware that could become really annoying in the future, and not that I can't run a show-off application on LAN Parties. . I was used to just knowing that my old Intel platform was running everything I threw at it.

BTW, 3Dmark 2005 was reinstalled a few times on virgin installations of XP and 2003...

Funny thing: 3Dmark 2003 works.

Oh well, maybe someone else has a clue.