Radeon 7500 locks up system

[lorlabnew]

Hello,

I just bought ATI Radeon 7500 AGP 64MB DDR to replace my old TNT adapter (Diamond Viper V550 AGP 16MB)... the system started to lock-up up regularly within 3-5 minutes. This is absolutely OS independent, and happens under Win2k, Linux and DOS as well. About everything just freezes up rock solid suddenly: screen, keyboard, mouse ..... I checked for resource conflicts, there are none (at least not apparent ones). System worked absolutely smooth before with mentioned TNT board...

My motherboard is an older BX440 (Abit BH6), powered by 250W power supply; could this be the problem?

Thx for advice.
Dave

 

[lorlabnew]

and an update:

I put 300W PS in instead; it suddenly rebooted once; the second time it froze as before. ... I'm not sure what's going on, but it's somehow PS related obviously (I didn't see any spontaneous reboot before).

Thx for any suggestions.

Dave

 

[bigpig]

Are you trying different drivers?

 

[lorlabnew]

Originally posted by: bigpig
Are you trying different drivers?

No, the same... as I mentioned, this problem happens under DOS (when ran HWinfo to check resources) and under Linux as well; so I don't think it has anything to do with operating system...

Now I've been running on 300W for a while, but froze again, after some 10 minutes or so.. 🙁

 

[ChefJoe]

Umm, is everything cooling ok? Touch all the heatsinks and main chips with your finger after one of these lockups and see if there's anything like low airflow around the AGP slot.

 

[lorlabnew]

Originally posted by: ChefJoe
Umm, is everything cooling ok? Touch all the heatsinks and main chips with your finger after one of these lockups and see if there's anything like low airflow around the AGP slot.

I touched the heatsink on the card (not memory chips itself, didn't think of that unfortunately) before I removed the card finally yesterday evening, and it seemed to be fairly cold... I put back the original TNT Viper550.
Havo no idea what was the problem; I noticed one thing I didn't mentioned before; always right when the machine froze, I could heard this click-clack sound which CD-ROM's does on the reboot; since I thought first about conflict with IDE, I unplugged the CD-ROM and disabled onboard IDE entirely, but machine kept locking up. With stronger PS it took only a bit longer for lockup to happen, but happened anyway eventually; as I said before, the machine once even rebooted itself instead of lockup.

Overall, I have no clue what's wrong (except guessing PS); I'll return the adapter today and stay with TNT (it renders very nice anyway - just a bit slower)..

thx
dave

 

[BFG10K]

Make sure you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for your system and try to use safe defaults in the BIOS.
Also make sure you have correctly removed all traces of your TNT from all OSes.

 

[lorlabnew]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Make sure you have the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for your system and try to use safe defaults in the BIOS.
Also make sure you have correctly removed all traces of your TNT from all OSes.

Hi,

I've got the latest BIOS for my BH6 (xxxxxxx-SS is the latest according to Abit; it's an older board - 1.02 revision as well); I played with BIOS settings (didn't do full default reset, but changed all questionable items one at the time at least). The Radeon kept locking up as before; as I said, it got a bit better with 300w PS; the crashes didn't come that early but inevitably happened later anyway (and experienced one full reboot on it's own).

I have quite enough of twaking this for now; I'll just return this Radeon, and on the next occasion will buy new mb/cpu instead...

thx for suggestions & help anyway
dave