Radeon 9800 Issue

[obes2k]

I can usually figure these things out in a matter of minutes, but this one has me stumped.

Lets start with the specs;

P4 3.2e
p4c800-e deluxe
1028M xms 3200LL running dual channel
msi rx9800 pro 128
480W Thermaltake psu
xaserIII case w/7 fans

Ok, now to the nitty gritty.

The card is roughly 3 months old, and ran OK up to this point (I had higher hopes for it at the purchase point, but thats a-whole-nother thread). 2 days ago I was in a drag race on nfsu2 when the comp restarted -> 15 min into running the game.

Since then, every game played does one of either 3 things, all of which occur within 10 min of playing a game;

a) 3/5 times its a simple crash to the desktop
b) 1/5 freeze requiring reset
c) 1/5 random reboot

This is very annoying, as you could imagine, especially to me, since I'm a gaming junkie.

What I've tried thus far;

a) updating to newest catalyst drivers
b) reverting as far as 4 steps back on catalyst drivers (all of which worked fine before)
c) setting the ATI properties to play games "performance not quality"
d) different variations of v-sync, experimenting with numerous games
e) slowing from 8x to 4x AGP
f) disabling fast write
g) slightly underclocking the card (it was overclocked once for a period of 20 min a month ago, not pushed hard)

It seems alot like an over heating issue... but all these games I play that crash all worked great, hours on end before 2 days ago... which leads me to beleive that this card might be dying on me.

When I play games before the crash, they all run just as well as before, NO more noticable lag what-so-ever.

If I left anything out, feel free to ask for more info, and ANY help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance ~obes

 

[resStealth]

well the psu looks good. first off it could be bad ram. try both sticks by theirselves and see if that fixes it. ive heard of the catlyst drivers being problematic. try reverting to a different driver for the card, not the catlyst. if that dosen't help, check your temperatures.

 

[obes2k]

A little update:

Curiously, I underclocked the card good (378 / 338) to (354.60 / 315) and noticed an older game ran crash free (tribes), for an hour until i quit anyway, but then switched to enemy territory and after 5 min it crashed again...

Really seems to be pointing at cooling, since tribes is a lesser game to push (I have v-sync enabled @ 85hz).

My question now, is should I even spend the money on say... VGA Silencer, since this card is likely going shot... I really dont want to have to spend the money on a new vid card, but if I buy a new gpu cooler just to find out that the card is going shot, its just going to waste more money I dont have.

On a different note, crashs only occur full screen, not windowed. I can run windowed benchmarks and overclock the poo out of the card and it wont error out... Again leading me to beleive its a driver type issue... but these drivers weren't touched for weeks before this all started happening.

Any more ideas?

 

[ironique]

Have you tried resStealth's RAM suggestion? It may be your RAM, test each dimm separately. Could solve your problem.

 

[KGB]

Are you getting anything logged into Event Viewer?

 

[spacelord]

Make sure you completely uninstall the OLD ATI drivers before installing the NEW.
ATI vid drivers are picky about that.. where NVIDIA seem to be ok without the complete uninstall.

 

[obes2k]

I checked out the RAM issue, trying each seperately, and at first I thought that did the trick. Turns out it only postpones the crash by another 5 min. Odd how reducing the ram would make the game actually last longer before crash...

Event viewer doesn't pick up on the crashes, and I've been going for hours at a time gaming, crashing, noting specific crash times, then in to check to find nothing.

As far as the ATI drivers, I haven't NOT uninstalled previous drivers before installing new ones since windows 98.


On a seperate note, I have been getting a warning for my pri hard disk for a couple months now. "The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." That may be the source of my problem, as I have let it go for months simply because I couldn't notice any degradation in performance or errors of any sort after the warning started poping up. Perhaps it's finally starting to near death, but damn, everything other than games works fine...

 

[DimZiE]

On a seperate note, I have been getting a warning for my pri hard disk for a couple months now. "The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." That may be the source of my problem, as I have let it go for months simply because I couldn't notice any degradation in performance or errors of any sort after the warning started poping up. Perhaps it's finally starting to near death, but damn, everything other than games works fine...

this might be the problem since games uses a huge amount of space for swap files around 700-1300 MB (unless you set it to a spesific amount)and since your hard drive is failing when the game uses the swap file it leads to a crash

you might want to try to backup your partition do a clean format on the harddrive and re-copy the backed up partition onto the drive.

depends on the error on your HDD ( logical or physical bad sectors /something else ) if it's logical error this should solve your problem. (had the same experience last week)

 

[ironique]

You appear to have received a SMART related warning/error. It may be a logical error but usually it's physical. Seems like your HDD's had it. You need to backup the contents and get yourself a new HDD.