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My 9600xt has started to crap out on me

S

Super56K

Golden Member
Just recently my sapphire 9600xt card I use has started to act funny on me. Today it has been the worst and doesn't seem like it will get any better. The card is running and always has been at the stock settings and has been running good since early march and it now started doing this. If I start up a game or 3dmark03 and after a few minutes the computer goes to a still screen with multicolored lines all over it, and sometimes just a single solid color. I've been trying all kinds of stuff tonight. I uninstalled the drivers, reseated the card, ran driver cleaner and tried again but still did the same thing. And the worst thing is I feel I may have been scammed over ebay for this card.

The thing is the card I won off ebay was a powercolor 9600pro ez version but the seller e-mailed me saying that he accidently sent me the wrong card which was a sapphire 9600xt but I was in no way obligated to send it back to him and I had the rest of my computer that I had just ordered waiting on the card anyways and considered it a stroke of good luck. Now I feel he may have purposely done it for just this reason.

Anyone got some suggestions for me? I'm going to go dig up my old ati7000 agp card and swap it out to completely be sure it's the videocard. Thanks in advance for all suggestions.

EDIT: My ati7000 card passed 3dmark2001 and I played ut2k4(man that game can run on about anything!) for a while and no troubles whatsoever. So my 9600xt is defective. Maybe overheating or something.

I'm in the process of e-mailing sapphire back and forth now and they aren't helping me too much either. I don't believe they have a warranty of any kind on their cards other than what the retailer might offer.

I'll propably e-mail the ebay seller after I'm sure that sapphire can't do anything to help me because I'm positive the seller will either A.) not reply or B.) will most likely tell me I should have sent the card back upon receiving. Now that I look at it again I really don't think I can throw the blame back at him. The card was purchased off of him on March 8, and received the card on the 14th I believe. So it's been a little over a month now and up until a few days ago it's been running fine.

The sellers name is: jester3001 and has a rating of 1060
 
e-mail the sender, if he sold you a defective card, under false pretenses, and he does not cooperate, you can report him to ebay, and they will look into it. Sellers CAN NOT sell malfunctioning cards under the description that they work. Good luck.

Give us the name of the seller, I will look into it for you.
 
The last two Sapphire Radeon 9700 non-pros I have received developed the same problem after a week or two. I think it is a serious quality control problem.
 
Blastman- I'm almost positive there was never an overdrive tab on my 9600xt. I believe it was a feature they listed but they don't have it.

rogue1979-I'll mention that to the sapphire tech support in my next e-mail to them.

Perfect time to be hurting for a video card, lol. 🙂
 
Not trying to offend you or anyone else, but that is why I steer clear of Sapphire cards. I bought a Sapphire9000pro card from newegg a while back and it was screwed up from day one. It would only do AGP2x and smelled like it was burning up, made my whole house smell like hot electronics! It also had artifacts in games. Of course newegg allowed me to return it and I got an FIC 9500pro to replace it. No problems. Still using an ATI AIW8500DV with no issues, and my new ATI 9800pro has been outstanding. To me it's worth the extra few $ to get a BB ATI card and not have to worry about having problems. I know a lot of people claim Sapphire makes cards for ATI and that may be true, but that doesn't mean that the Sapphire cards are of the same quality.
 
Are the line on the screen vertical bars (3-4) that are multicolored and twitchy? Sometimes in-between the bars you get a blurred texture effect?

My ATi 9800Pro did that, used to only happen during a game of Rise of Nations so I thought it was a driver issue. I could Alt-Tab out of the game and do a screen refresh and it would clear things up. A few months later though the screen would corrupt from boot up to the desktop and after multiple reboots it would clear. A few weeks after that the screen then became completely unreadable and I had to send it back to ATi for a new one.

ATi has a 3 year warranty on the card, I imagine Sapphire has a similar one. Just RMA it and send it back. I reread your post about dealing with Sapphire, why don't you contact ATi and see if they can do anything for you? It can't hurt...
 
The reason I asked about the temp is because maybe the heatsink isn?t making good contact with the GPU.

I pulled my BBATI 9600XT hestsink off -- and I wasn?t overly impressed with standard thermal-goop they used. It?s like yellow bubble gum and didn?t seem to cover much of the core at all. Cleaned the core up and put some Artic Silver Ceramique on it. Have it overclocked to 576 right now --as fast as Rage3d Tweak will go.

You might try reseating the heatsink with some new thermal compound.
 
Sapphire/Althon Micro makes a lot of the retail box ATi cards, so the card quality should be about the same. Support is another issue.

 
I never have and never will buy computer parts of of eBay, just for this reason...

As for Sapphire, I have owned 5 of there cards, and never had a single problem.

EDIT: Took a look at the jesters feed back, and he/she looks like a great eBayer.
 
I just reinstalled the card and have been tinkering with it again and about 3 minutes into the 3dmark2003 benchmark it froze again and it seems the lines are a different pattern each time. After I rebooted I got this message:

Driver for display device was unable to complete a drawing operation.

XP suggested under that, this: display driver seems to be responsible

Is that referring to my catalyst drivers or my motherboard chipset drivers? The newest omega drivers I was downloading are now done and I'm going to try those out and see if it still crashes the same. The chipset drivers for my motherboard(biostar m7ncd pro) are the most recent I think but I'll still download the chipset drivers from the website and try those if the omega's don't do it. If that still doesn't do it I'll install an overclocking utility and underclock my card to see if maybe it is just overheating.
 
I'll try that too. I haven't gotten to install the omega drivers yet though. Turns out it was only the partial file and I still need about 10megs of it to go. I'll reinstall the 4.3 catalyst drivers I've been using for a while.


I've also found a lot of information about the error I've gotten. There's a lot of info about it here. The error they call it is a loopback error and a large number of things can cause it, both on the software and hardware side. I've singled out though that it has to be the videocard because I ran and benched my ati7000 card last night for a while without any problems.
 
Update:

Since of course there isn't any RMA link at Sapphire's website the only thing you can do is e-mail.

While they were quick to respond to my e-mails, their only solution was to obtain an RMA from the original vendor, they obviously won't RMA the defective part themselves.

I find that pathetic considering that Sapphire manufactures a good deal if not all of ATI's video cards. I have used ATI's RMA service before and they treated me extremely well.

I guess I don't have to say this is the last time I ever buy any Sapphire product!
 
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