interesting gfx card problem

[renesisX]

God, I am pretty upset right now over this. Mainly because I didn't spend all this money to NOT be able to play my favorite games and mods, so heres the deal. I first thought it was the fact that the power supply that came with my case was way too weak for my setup. (Probably was anyhow) So I upgraded to new PSU that is maxxed at 550 watts and is steady at 480. Enough power for now, I am not over clocking anything.

What happens is that mainly when I play any games. (More specifically and Source Engine based games) the screen will freeze and then the monitor will eventually go black (light will flash orange every second and every once in a while I get an error message from the monitor saying out of frequency) Anyhow, this happens 100% of the time I play and Source based games. I've had it happen once on my desktop in the last couple of weeks and once in Unreal 2004. Also once in Dawn of War. (Far cry works just fine however as well as Call of Duty and Battlefield Vietnam) This past week I've noticed that I have been getting alot of VPU recovery errors from my ATI card. Mind you I never had a problem with the card for 6 months, I had it in my dad's rig for a while before I finally got the pieces together in my rig. I suddenly have problems with it in my setup with the VPU recoveries and freezing, it's odd. I mean, at first I thought it was because of a lack of power. I only had a max 350 watt powersupply so I figured, yeah thats it. So I bought a new supply with enough juice and I still get the same problem along with VPU recovery errors.

My setup is the following:
A64 3500+ Winchester
MSI mobo (model K8T Neo2-FIR) updated with latest bios and VIA hyperion drivers (i have even tried without the drivers and with olders ones)
Saphire 9600 Pro
250 GB Hitachi Deskstar
480 Watt Thermaltake PSU
Sony DVD/CD writer
Win XP Prof.

I have formatted and reinstalled windows to see if it was a "bad" install by chance. I have tried old, current and beta drivers for my hardware, everything still gives me the same problem. Even with the new PSU I get the errors. My only conclusion is that the card somehow was damaged in transit to my system, but that wouldn't make sense since my other games work fine. Or I have badluck with VIA chipsets and they just suck hardcore. (I've had numerous problems with them before, should have gone nforce)

Any help in advance is greatly appreciated. Thanks. Oh and hi, by the way I'm new. (not a noob either, i'm pretty knowledgablel when it comes to computers, this one time I am stumped or maybe not)

 

[fishmonger12]

what brand of power supply?

run adaware, antivirus, make sure you installed all your drivers in order and did windows update.

run memtest overnight on the system and see if any errors show up.

if no memtest errors, run prime95 overnight and see if any errors show up.

if you don't know what memtest or prime95 is, just search on the web they show up fairly quickly.

 

[renesisX]

Thanks for the reply, I will run memtest again as well as prime95. Like I said with the drivers I've tried every combination. New, old or beta I've tried them all. And windows is up to date. I'm narrowing it down to the fact that perhaps the card is buggy with this mobo or its a fatal error on Valve's part. By the way it's a Thermaltake "Silent Purepower 480W"

I will get back to you on the tests once they finish.

 

[renesisX]

I ran the tests and nothing came up, everything "seems" fine but not really. This is getting retarded. I am gonna start messin with the BIOS settings now to see if maybe something is being finicky.

 

[renesisX]

Update: Turned out to be my card was a bitch and needs to be replaced. :/