Installed a new 8500LE.. system crashes very frequently

[HardTech]

My old card was an ATI Radeon LE DDR (the old-school 32meg kind). That worked fine for a bit, but I wanted to upgrade to something that is slightly better (not looking for expensive video cards), and had both DVI and S-Video out. I found an ATI Radeon 8500 LE 64meg that fits all of that for a relatively cheap price so I picked it up.

I installed the latest Catalyst drives and uninstalled my previous Radeon drivers (but not before installing the new video card...)

now, my system crashes every so often. I'll be surprised if I wake up in the morning and have my computer NOT frozen. Sometimes, it'll freeze while watching a movie or while doing homework, and rarely it will just straight up reboot

I've taken the card out, examined it to find any shorts, blew any dust off, and reinstalled it.. I've also reinstalled the drivers and installed the Control Panel for it. It still causes my system to crash.

Any ideas? It's a Made by ATI product, not Powered by ATI if it makes a difference

 

[xSauronx]

rma it, i had the same sporadic sh!t with my 8500le

wait, i had ALOT of trouble with ati getting a good card, return it to where you ought it and get another one

 

[DieHardware]

Is your p/s up to the task?(good quality) What MB are you using?

I installed the latest Catalyst drives and uninstalled my previous Radeon drivers (but not before installing the new video card...)

Did you use one of the driver eradicator apps to get rid of the old drivers? My $0.02

 

[propellerhead]

Yea... what he said.

Try setting your video back to plain VGA then do whatever to remove the old drivers.

I had zero problems with my 8500.

 

[HardTech]

what's a good program that erases old drivers?

 

[Parrotheader]

I'm in almost the EXACT same boat (even upgraded from the old school 32MB LE to the same 8500LE.) I've been very pleased with the performance, but mine crashes quite a bit too and it's driving me nuts especially when I'm playing BF1942. Sometimes it'll just crash back to the desktop but sometimes the whole system will just reboot completely. I was trying to think back to when the problem started because I've had the card for about 4-5 months now without any major problems until recently. I'm assuming the latest driver revision didn't agree with it. I've uninstalled it several times but still have problems. What's a good driver cleaner program?

1.3Gig Celeron
MSI 694T mobo
640MB PC133
300 Watt PS

 

[Mem]

what's a good program that erases old drivers?

Driver Cleaner 1.3 .

 

[Cybordolphin]

Thanks MEM. That looks like a cool program.

 

[HardTech]

I took apart my whole computer (even my CPU and heatsink) to make sure it isn't anything hardware related.. blew the dust off, made sure the CPU was attached to the heatsink properly, made extra sure everything was connected well..

now, the video card crashes even faster when I'm playing a game (but I haven't had it crash yet when I'm just doing normal stuff on the desktop)

could it be a driver issue? should I install some old drivers?

 

[Killrose]

Have you flashed the card to a retail 275/275MHz? If you did it could be a heat issue. What is it clocked at? Try playing with the AGP aperture size in bios, try 64mb first, then 128mb or 32mb. I had several 8500's and played a lot of BF1942 at that time (the demo) and the only time i really had problems like you are experiencing, was when overclocking.

Lots of BF1942 heats up the whole system over time

 

[HardTech]

yeah, it could be overclocking.. I overclocked it to 300 and tried to play it. It froze after a minute of gameplay...

I just set it back down to the default 275/275 and it froze after like 30 minutes