Bad 9800pro?

[Lynnch1213]

ASPIRE X-Navigator Black Case /450W Generic Power Supply
POWERCOLOR ATI RADEON 9800 Video Card, 256MB DDR, 128-Bit,
Pentium 4 2.4c 800fsb
Crucial 184 Pin 512MB DDR400 PC-3200
Rosewill 52x32x52x16 CD-RW Black Combo Drive
Samsung Black floppy
120gb Hard drive
Albatron PX845pev pro800 mobo
Creative Extigy External
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Crashes randomly while playing graphic intensive games like UT2004 and FarCry
Sometimes i can play UT for half an hour (then crash) FarCry goes for at most half a min
Either get a garbled screen then VPU recover, or the monitor goes black and have to manually kill
"VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands"
"VPU Recover was unable to fully recover from a hardware deadlock, and has switched to software rendering"
Not overclocked as far as i know, left at defaults
Plays Halflife1 on opengl or direct3d without crashing (I went for a hour an a half no prob)
Can watch dvds and surf the web just fine
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Ive tried catalyst 4.11 and 4.12beta,,fastwrites are off
I doubt cooling is an issue
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Any ideas?

 

[jbass]

I had the same problem. I RMA'ed mine, and will be getting another in about a week. hopefully it was the card and not something else

 

[CraigRT]

sounds like a power issue to me, but i could be wrong.

 

[kuangs168]

same problem here. i say is PS not juicy enough for the card... crashes at UT04, doom3 and far cry at high settings. i dont have money to replace the PS so i dont play and PC games now.

btw i have antec 430w PS already, still no good............ sigh

 

[nataku00]

I had some issues with games crashing to desktop, not as serious as yours though. I read somewhere that 9800 pros doesn't like 8x agp on some mobos (asus specifically) and after switching to 4x agp in bios, i have had no issue with the card playing any of the new games (moh😛a, hl2, etc).

Your problem also sounds like a cooling issue possibly. Try stressing the card (i.e. playing one of those games) with your side panel off to see if it helps any. If you have a temp probe on your 9800 pro, see if you can report the temps your gpu is reaching.

Sorry if i'm not too technical, i've always been a 'fidget and see what happens' when it comes to my comps. Forgive me for being a mechanical engineer...

 

[Pete]

I have similar problems with my 9700P: spontaneous reboots or simply hard locks with a black screen (sometimes even with a "display signal out of range"). It's possible it could be a power issue (all my lines are within 5%, but my 3.3V line is on the low side of 5%), but I haven't ruled out a software problem. Won't be able to rule it out till after I replace my BIOS, either. :-/

 

[housecat]

increase you agp voltages to 1.7 from 1.5 if it is not already.

made my 9800 pro run great on my 300watt enermax.

 

[big4x4]

Originally posted by: housecat
increase you agp voltages to 1.7 from 1.5 if it is not already.

made my 9800 pro run great on my 300watt enermax.

Don't you risk burning the card out when upping the volts like that? I made a post about upping the agp voltage

 

[kuangs168]

i have asus a7n8x-e, so will the 4x agp in bios fix the problem? will is slow down the performance of the card?