Radeon 8500LE woes, do I have a bad card?

[RaynorWolfcastle]

I got a new Retail Radeon 8500LE. As is my standard practice, I revert everything to stock speed before installing new hardware and leave it that way until I know it is stable. Well, I uninstalled my (ATI Radeon 7500)drivers, put all hardware at stock settings, and rebooted with a standard VGA driver. Then I plug the card in and boot up again. Install the latest (Catalyst 2.3) drivers, and reboot. I fire up 3DMark and run it for a couple of loops to test stability... no problems there.

Since I don't play 3DMark () , I pop NHL 2001 in and start playing, every once in a while the textures tear briefly, uh oh... I keep playing and about midway through the second period the computer crashes hard (CTRL-ALT-DEL has no effect), bigger uh oh...

- So I fire up warcraft 3 and play for a bit: there is no cracking or tearing. Game seemingly runs fine (though I didn't play very long). hmmmm...
- Fire up UT2003 demo, no problems with cracking or tearing during the 2 meatches I played.... hmmm...
- Fire up NHL 2001 again, tearing still happens occasionally, and the game ends up crashing the system again. When I boot up again WinXP gives me a message telling me that the Radeon 8500LE driver is causing system instabiliy.

So I guess I want to know is, does this sound like a hardware problem or a software problem? Any advice on how to try to root out this problem?
If it is a hardware problem, should I bring it back to the store where I bought it (grabbed the last one off the shelf) or should I RMA it to ATI?

I should probably add that I didn't have any problems with my previous Radeon 7500 and this is the only hardware change I've made since then.
Also important system specs are as follow:
- Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1400 MHz (since I installed the card)
- Epox 8K3A @ 133/166
- 1x512 MB Corsair PC3200C2 @ PC2700, Cas 2, 2-5-2 1T
- Brand-spanking-new, Built by ATI , Retail Radeon 8500LE, 128 MB
- Linksys Network card
- Windows XP Pro w/SP1
- Catalyst 2.3 drivers

As usual any help is greatly appreciated
***Update***
So I tried looping 3DMark2001 on the fresh install of WinXP Pro. I set it to 10 loops and it crashed in Dragothic after running through that portion a couple of times. It also crashed on me while playing UT2003. I will try the 6193 drivers later, but now that it's crashed NHL 2001, UT2003, and 3DMark2001, I'm pretty sure it's the card. (Note that the system was completely stable with my previous Radeon 7500, never crashing in any of these games with the same set of drivers)

 

[Duvie]

Well first off, Do you have an le that is power by ATI or built by ATI??? If you have a power by (built by 3rd party) you can't use the catalyst 2.3drivers...Go to ATI's website and find the driver that supports these 3rd party cards....

Also for a clean uninstall you need to clean the registry keys...yes I know it is a pain in the arse but it has to be done....go to Rage3d.com and go into the forums and get the guide for uninstalling old drivers....

Does the hard crash look like all vertical lines of differing colors or freeze up???

Overall ATI drivers are still buggy, and even more so with le and 3rd party support...I own one (le) and I can attest to still og getting the tv-out to function or look right.....

I think it is a software issue and winxp got it right....

 

[Budman]

Well first off, Do you have an le that is power by ATI or built by ATI??? If you have a power by (built by 3rd party) you can't use the catalyst 2.3drivers...

Yes you can use Catalyst 2.3 drivers on a powered by ATI card, get them here ---> http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/powered.html


You also might want to try these drivers. ----> http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4094.html

 

[Duvie]

That is interesting...When I first got this card the builds of the drivers were different from the power by and built by pages, and the talk at rage3d.com forums was not to use built by ati as some manufacturers need there own drivers to get things like tv-out to work properly....

Good to know though thanks.....

 

[nortexoid]

uh, one game crashes and the rest run fine...how'd u figure it might be a hardware problem???

try using the latest built/powered by ATI drivers and fiddling around w/ some of the settings depending on what API is being used...does NHL use d3d or ogl, for instance?

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

ok, well I set XP so that it shows me the STOP error instead of rebooting immediately and tried to loop 3D mark 2001 30 times overnight and when I woke up this morning I had a nice STOP error referring to an ATI driver file.
now to answer specific questions:
Duvie: I highlighted a part of my original post for ya Like I mentioned in my original post, the texture tearing looks like a big triangular part of the image hasn't been rendered (is black) for a fraction of a second. When the game locks up it just stops altogether on one frame and I can't do anything at all, except hit the reboot button.
Budman: I will give these a try, thanks.
Nortexoid: I suspect it's a hardware issue because of the way the tearing described above. It reminds me of what my Radeon 7500 did when I tried to OC it too much. Now that 3DMark has BSOD'd on me it's not just the one game any more

Meanwhile, I'll try Duvie's suggestion of cleaning everything incl. the registry keys then I'll install the 6193 drivers Budman pointed to to see if it helps.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Well, I did a clean install of Windows XP and installed the latest WHQL certified drivers (6166). I reinstalled NHL2001 and had the same visual artifacts as before . When the first period was nearly over the game crashed and I got kicked back to the desktop. So there's two possibilities: there is an issue with the game and the card or the card is bad. Given the fact that 3dMark2001SE crashed yesterday as I looped it for stability, I'm thinking this is probably a bad card

 

[DieHardware]

Did you install the latest AGP drivers for your board? Have you installed any patches(if there are any) for NHL2k1? Tried running your RAM @ 133?(Memtest86 it?) Just a few things I would try.

 

[apoppin]

Well I upgraded from the original Radeon DDR 64 VIVO to the Radeon 8500 without even changing the drivers without issues - Catalyst is unified enough for both cards to run well (but then I run Win98Se for gaming).

It seems to me that the issue is mostly with one game. Do you have the latest patch for the game?

Also for truly difficult Radeon issues, visit the Rage3D forums - you will hear from other Radeon owners who have the same game.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

So I tried looping 3DMark2001 on the fresh install of WinXP Pro. I set it to 10 loops and it crashed in Dragothic after running through that portion a couple of times. It also crashed on me while playing UT2003. I will try the 6193 drivers later, but now that it's crashed NHL 2001, UT2003, and 3DMark2001, I'm pretty sure it's the card.

DieHardware: I have the latest Via 4-in-1s installed. NHL 2001 is completely up to date. And my RAM runs stable at 185MHz DDR with the fastest timings so I didn't even bother testing it for stability at 166 or 133.
apoppin: I'll see if I can find anything on the rage3d forums but at this point I'm fairly certain the card is the problem. I really doubt Microsoft would WHQL certify drivers that crashed consistently

 

[Duvie]

Well the built by ATI cards are usually better then like my power by ATI...the card seems cheaper looking and I have oc'd it and the core can go to about 280-285 while the memory can only do 260 before artifacts...i think they used sub par memory....My default is 250/250 but I have not had issues that haven't been fixed by old driver cleanup.....

Most Le cards built by ati should do 275/275 easy....

definitely check out rage3d as they are more of an authority on radeon and any issues to date....

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Originally posted by: Duvie
Well the built by ATI cards are usually better then like my power by ATI...the card seems cheaper looking and I have oc'd it and the core can go to about 280-285 while the memory can only do 260 before artifacts...i think they used sub par memory....My default is 250/250 but I have not had issues that haven't been fixed by old driver cleanup.....

Most Le cards built by ati should do 275/275 easy....

definitely check out rage3d as they are more of an authority on radeon and any issues to date....

Well the RAM on the card is 3.6ns BGA, so in theory it should be capable of hitting 275 MHz, but that's not even a consideration until I get it working properly at 250/250

 

[apoppin]

I'd visit the Rage forums. Tearing and artifacting in a few instances is generally related to issues with drivers, O/S's and/or conflicts.

Of course if it is easy to do a RMA - go for it - to rule out the card.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

TTT

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

bump