Newly acquired Radeon 9700 Pro freezes otherwise working computer SOLID

[TerryMathews]

I've got a HTPC (PC-DL, dual Xeons, i875 northbridge) that is otherwise 100% stable, I mean uptime measured in months, running SageTV. It has a GeForce FX5200 in it (I know...).

Here in the near future I'm going to have to start playing WoW, at least occasionally, on my HTPC, so I thought I would upgrade the video card to something decent. A reputable trader here sold me a working AGP Radeon 9700 Pro (Built by ATi). No matter what I do, it locks the computer up solid in 30 minutes-3 hours.

I should point out here that SageTV keeps the card in 3d mode the entire time it is running, the interface is 3d and I use VMR9 for video playback, so it uses the GPU as well. Not a heavy load, granted, but a constant one.

I uninstalled the nVidia drivers and ran Driver Cleaner Pro before I installed the card or the ATi drivers. I tried the latest drivers at amd.com and I tried the latest Omega Radeon drivers. I disabled Fast Writes in the Omega drivers, couldn't find a place to do it in the official drivers.

The card had a floppy power connector straight from the PSU and the PSU is an Antec TruePower 480W PSU.

Only two possibilities I can come up with are:
A) Heat. Unlikely since the FX5200 is passively cooled and has no problems.
B) Card has some unknown defect.

I should also point out that in a previous life this system was my desktop and had a Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro in it and had no troubles, so there are no weird BIOS issues that I know of.

I'm kind of hoping some Radeon guru will chime in and say I need to set HKLM->System->Radeon->Freezing = 0. But I have a feeling I'm going to have to send the card back.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[coinz]

I had put in a AIW 9800 pro built by ATI a little while ago in my bro's computer at first it was doing the same thing locking up..it was heat related I went and changed the compound under the heatsink it was barely makin contact with the gpu..seems to have fixed it but I think it may have gotten damaged after he kept using it..was running fine for a few weeks now it starts randomly restarting. I have to take it back out and check it.

I'd say check the heatsink is making proper contact.

 

[TerryMathews]

Thanks for the advice, the compound/pad under the HSF has hardened into an almost cement-like compount. 30 minutes later, I've got both the HSF and the core cleaned and fresh thermal compound applied. Trying it now, will update if it fixes problem or not.

I guess the 9700 Pro predates VPU recover for overheating? I had a 9600 that would give me the VPU recover has interrupted a system crash or whatever it said.