Quake 3 Arena Locks up with Radeon x1950xt

[TC10284]

Hey all,

I just built a new system:
Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R
2GB DDR2667 (will be 4GB soon)
Sapphire Radeon x1950xt
Antec Trio 600w
Core 2 Duo E6600
Win XP Pro x64 SP2

I have the latest Intel chipset drivers and ATI Catalyst 7.6 drivers installed.
Each time I try to run Quake 3 (1.32c), the screen goes white for a few seconds, then either sits there and does nothing, or starts to load the game and shortly after getting into the menu, the game locks up and I have to hit the reset button as ctrl-alt-del will not work (that I can see). Strange thing is, last night I had my x1600 in the same system and Q3 worked great.

What's the deal?

I am very frustrated because Q3 is my favorite/most played game and I've been having many problems with PunkBuster in Q3 running Vista on my previous system that only adds to my frustration...

 

[xtknight]

Do you have DEP (Data Execution Protection) enabled? What about the Windows Firewall? Both of these can cause problems with Q3.

 

[TC10284]

I disabled No Execute in the BIOS and tried the /noexecute=AlwaysOff switch in boot.ini
The Windows Firewall has not been on.

I installed UT2004 and patched to the latest version, only to find out that it crashes immediately too. The game will start to load, then the screen goes blank and my monitor goes into standby mode.

Sigh.....

I'm going to try my old x700 to see if I have problems then.

 

[TC10284]

When I install the x700 and reinstall the same drivers, games seem to work fine...


What in the world?

 

[bryanW1995]

(gives funny look to sapphire x1950xt that was installed 2 days ago) um, good thing I don't play quake 3 or ut2004.

 

[xtknight]

Probably the card itself or the drivers. I haven't had too many issues with NVIDIA 64 drivers, but maybe the situation is different with ATI.

Sure it's not overheating? Check the temps? Downclock it?

Is the system actually crashing? Quake 3 does grab control of the screen pretty viciously but that doesn't mean the whole system actually crashed. You can tell by disabling "automatic reboot on failure" in the options, and then by seeing if any minidumps (kernel dumps) have been left around in %SystemRoot%\Minidump.

Actually most of the times you'd see a blue screen or it would reboot if there was even going to be a dump, so it's more likely driver failure due to overheating or some other hardware problem more than anything else.

 

[TC10284]

UPDATE:

Tried installing XP Pro 32bit with x1950xt, same problem
Tried x1950xt in another system, different chipset, Win XP Pro x64 - same problem

I'm about to create an RMA with Newegg...

 

[BFG10K]

Do you have problems with other Quake 3 engined games?

 

[TC10284]

I tried UT2004 and it did the same thing =\

 

[BFG10K]

If UT2004 is crashing it sounds like you have a system problem (UT2004 does not use the Quake 3 engine).

Are you overclocking anything?