HIS Radeon HD 4670 (AGP) throws 0x8e, BSOD on Flash video

[ganymede]

Pretty much what it says in the title. Everything works fine, desktop runs at native resolution of display (1680x1050), games run fullscreen from 1280x768 to 1680x1050, but anytime I try to start a flash video (I tested with youtube and PATV) there's a noticeable click from the case and a BSOD with 0x0000008E (KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED). At first I suspected the external soundcard being unplugged but youtube videos do play when I have no VGA drivers installed. I read that installing the HDMI audio drivers can create an interrupt conflict, so I tried without those.

Here's what I tried so far and the results
1. Manufacturer's drivers, upgraded to latest (11.12): BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
2. Manufacturer's drivers: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
3. Latest drivers: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
4. Latest drivers without HDMI audio drivers: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
5. Manufacturer's drivers withouth HDMI audio drivers: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
6. No drivers: video playback works
7. Manufacturer's drivers without HDMI audio drivers or Avivo: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot
8. Latest drivers without HDMI audio drivers or Avivo: BSOD
Reboot, uninstall drivers, reboot, delete %WINDIR%\system32\ati*.dll, reboot
9. Manufacturer's drivers without HDMI audio drivers or Avivo: BSOD

Here's where I gave up. Assorted forum wisdom found by google suggested that:
1. The drivers work fine
2. There are BSODs under Win7 but not XP (I use XP)
3. Stop looking at Flash videos for the rest of your natural life

I'm just about out of ideas. I don't have a memdump at the moment (posting from work laptop) but I can provide one later if necessary (the error is nothing if not reproducible).

Rig:
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
AMD Athlon64 3000+ S939 cooled by Thermalright XP-90
2x512MB Infineon 3-3-3-8
HIS Radeon HD 4670 AGP, 1GB
CoolerMaster RealPower 450W
WinXP SP3 + all updates


P.S.: I don't think it has any bearing on the issue, but who knows: due to the bulkiness of the VGA cooler, I was forced to switch out the passive Zalman northbridge cooler from a ZM-NB47J to a ZM-NB32K. Even that was a tiny bit too large, but bending the combs closest to the VGA cooler solved that. It seems like the northbridge cooler is firmly in place and not being flexed against the VGA cooler, but I guess I cannot entirely rule out northbridge overheating.

P.P.S.: Removing the pushpins that held the ZM-NB47J required unscrewing the motherboard and -- due to space constraints -- unplugging most cables from it. Everything except the front panel audio connectors were plugged back exactly as they were (they're not used anyway on account of the external soundcard).


***UPDATE***
Tried to start Half-Life 1 as a random test, it said the selected OpenGL mode (1280x960) was not supported by the card. Tried to start in 1280x960 Direct3D, got a "Video driver stopped responding" error message (something like that, the dialog contents didn't render and I only saw the title for a few seconds before all video output was lost). Runs fine with software rendering. Currently running Video Memory Stress Test v1.7.116, no errors after 1 hour, the Aerogate II reports VGA temperature of 35 °C.

 

[LtGoonRush]

First, some basic hardware diagnostics: Run Crystal Disk Info to verify none of your drives show Caution (Yellow), which will mean they are failing and need to be replaced. Verify that the system can complete a full pass of Memtest86+ without errors. Check the videocard temperatures with GPU-Z and the CPU temperatures with CoreTemp to make sure they're reasonable.

If that all checks out, I'd uninstall the current drivers, run Driver Sweeper to remove the remnants, then install the latest Catalyst drivers. Don't forget to install the Catalyst Application Profiles package after you reboot! Also uninstall Adobe flash and install the latest version directly from the Adobe website. Make sure you're running Firefox 9. If all else fails, you can disable hardware acceleration for Flash Videos by right-clicking on the video, selecting, Settings, clicking the Display tab on the bottom left, and UNchecking "Enable hardware acceleration."

One thing I should note is that 1GB isn't nearly enough system RAM these days. If you plan to keep using this system, I would really try to put another gig in, preferably a pair of 1GB modules, assuming you're able to fix this problem. That is a really old system though, so a new machine should be a priority.

 

[ganymede]

Thanks for the tips! A few things to note though:

-The physical sensors on my CoolerMaster Aerogate II report GPU temperatures of ~30 °C.
-I recently reinstalled Flash after some Flash videos began skipping, I'm relatively certain that bit's up to date.
-I'm not really using any applications from these days This is the "watch movies, make music, play old games" computer. For work and cutting edge stuff I have my laptop.

Edit: disabling hardware acceleration on Flash videos is not a viable solution, because the crash happens before the first frame is even displayed. For short videos, this could mean that I have maybe half a second to do everything you described. Also, this won't work for, say, an embedded video 3 screens down the page which decides to play.

 

[Dark Shroud]

I don't believe AGP supports hardware video acceleration, especially for Flash video.

 

[LtGoonRush]

A couple things I should mention:
-Use GPU-Z to check your videocard temperatures, the temperature your probe measures doesn't mean anything. You want the temperature of the sensors physically inside the GPU core and such, which GPU-Z will read.
-Do make sure you step through my suggestions in order, it's kind of important. Check the hardware first with the tests I listed, and IF those check out, move on to the software. See my note about drivers lower in this post though.
-You can disable hardware acceleration from any Flash applet, not just video. For example, go to the Adobe Flash website, right-click on the pile of tablets flash graphic, click Settings, then on the lower left tab, UNcheck "Enable hardware acceleration."
-AGP shouldn't prevent you from using hardware acceleration. Even PCI-E 1x is enough bandwidth for the bitstream decoding AMD does (they even sell PCI-E 1x video decoder cards). Even if it had to do something more complex, AGP offers 1-2GB/sec of bandwidth.
-Though now that you've reminded me that this is an AGP card, the official Catalyst drivers don't work and you need to use the Catalyst AGP Hotfix drivers here. Sorry, I haven't used an AGP card in so long I forgot. Install the regular Catalyst Application Profiles, latest version here.

 

[ganymede]

The system completed a pass of Memtest86 without problems. I also used an app called Video Memory Stress Test, which is basically Memtest86 for GPUs. That ran for about 2 hours without any errors. I've uninstalled the drivers and ran Driver Cleaner Pro 1.5 for both ATi and nVidia (previous card was a GT6600). Reinstalled the drivers, same error.

The weird thing is, regular videos and regular Flash work fine. I tried the highest res movie I had (1280x544 H.264), works without a hitch. Then I went to adobe.com, installed flash, and the flash animation there didn't cause a problem. I went to a bunch of sites which host regular Flash but not streaming video and those work fine. It seems very specific to streaming Flash video content. I looked at a minidump and saw plugincontainer.exe (which Firefox uses) but I've since tested with IE and the same exact thing happens.

I'm downloading the apps you mentioned now, will get back with the data in a bit.

 

[ganymede]

Wow, I completely forgot to mention that the 4670 is a brand new card I put in like 3 days ago, before that I had a Leadtek A6600GT and everything was fine (except some choppiness on HD streaming videos).

Anyway, here are the results:

Spybot S&D recognizes CoreTemp as malware and I can't get it to run. I seriously doubt that the CPU is the issue since without any video drivers youtube videos do work.

I had GPU-Z in the foreground while attempting to play a youtube video, no change in any of the parameters (GPU temp actually went down 0.1 °C before the BSOD ).

A couple things I've noticed:
--I have two instances of ati2evxx.exe running
--The maximum AGP aperture in the BIOS is 512 MB

I'm going to uninstall and try the hotfix drivers + profiles, I'll update/reply as soon as that's done.

***UPDATE***
Uninstall, reboot, DriverCleaner Pro, reboot, install AGP hotfix, reboot, install Application Profiles, reboot. Problem persists.

 

[ganymede]

Youtube works after uninstalling Flash. It's telling me to upgrade to Flash 10 for "improved performance" but the video loads and plays.

 

[Arkadrel]

I don't believe AGP supports hardware video acceleration, especially for Flash video.

Its always the hardware video acceleration that facks things up.
My dad has a laptop with a intel IGP, and it facked up youtube videos too, because of it.
Turned off hardware acceleration and things run fine.

 

[manko]

Wow, I completely forgot to mention that the 4670 is a brand new card I put in like 3 days ago...

I just put a new 4670 in a system too and I have no issues with Flash or games, but it is a PCI-E card.

Its always the hardware video acceleration that facks things up.
My dad has a laptop with a intel IGP, and it facked up youtube videos too, because of it.
Turned off hardware acceleration and things run fine.

Yeah, early versions of Flash 10 really had problems with hardware acceleration. On my system with a GTX 260, I had stuttering with 360P and 480P videos until I disabled hardware acceleration. The software/CPU handled smooth playback just fine up to and including HD resolution. The Flash hardware acceleration has since been fixed on newer versions, so it no longer runs worse that software on my systems.

The current version of Flash is 11.1.102.55.