Radeon x1650 and old games - polygon meltdown

[BadOmen]

Hi there

I have an ATI Radeon x1650pro from Gigabyte (the fanless one. Oh silence....). Ok, not the best, but not the oldest either.

Yesterday I installed one of my old favourites, Operation Flashpoint GOTY, to play a little for the first time with this graphic card. Turns out that the flickering is horrible. As the game goes, more and more "bad pixels" appear. The whole image starts to crack down into crazy flickering polygons. I noticed that when playing Sacrifice too.

When I finally lose patience and turn it off.... how nice. The bad pixels stay there, over any windows application (even the desktop itself), until I restart the computer.

So, does the X1650 has any known issue with older games, T&L, and stuff like that? Any idea of how to fix it? I`m using the latest ATI driver and latest bios.

Thanks a lot!!!

Oh, by the way: the monitor is a Samsung lcd 19' I-forgot-the-model-but-it's-not-widescreen

 

[Denithor]

Sounds almost exactly like what happened to my x1900gt recently. Turned out to be overheating (ten month old card, stock cooling, never overclocked) and had to be returned to Newegg (thank goodness for their "standard return policy").

Two things you can try, improved cooling being the easiest. Take off the side of the case and aim a fan of some sort at the card so you get a nice airflow over the heatsink (fanless, you said, right?). If that works, rig up some kind of fan in the case to cool the card and you should be good to go.

Otherwise, you could try pulling the heatsink and using AS5 or AS Ceramique (prefered as non-conductive) instead of the stock thermal paste. You could also go with an aftermarket cooler, although for this card that doesn't really make sense.

 

[BadOmen]

Now that's something I never thought about.

yes, my card is about 10 months old too. 11, to be more exact. Never overclocked. It's a fanless one, and with Gigabyte's Silent Pipe thing, I wonder how I can remove that heatsink from it. The pipes seem quite sturdy.

I didn't have any other trouble with it, but I'm not exactly a gamer. Flashpoint is the most recent game I have played so far on my PC (Starcraft is the second. No, Pac Man wasn't the third:laugh. Well, it's working ok with Adobe Premiere.

But I'll definitely try the fan thing tonight and see how it goes. Will post the results here tomorrow morning.

Thanks for now

 

[Denithor]

Make sure you run something 3D to test it out, it probably won't heat up under normal desktop use.

I would run as is 3D to confirm problem is there (and what it takes to force it to occur), reboot, pop off the side, turn on a fan, and try it again. Looping in 3Dmark03/05 should work nicely if you have them available.

And don't pry anything off the board if it is still under warranty...just RMA it and let the vendor/manufacturer deal with the problem. Who knows, you may get a nice upgrade out of the deal.

 

[BadOmen]

Well, I tried with the fan. It was going pretty well.

Then I took out the fan. A few minutes after, the screen messed up badly and the game froze, took me back to desktop, I got a messagebox from ATI like "something caused VPU to crash", or something like that, the famous "send" "don''t send" buttons, and my resolution had been reduced. I closed everything.

Now the funniest thing: the game didn't crash. It was still in the task bar. I went back to it (still without the fan), and everything was totally normal, staying like that till I was sick of playing and turned it off.

THe heatsink was burning in the end, but the game never bugged my anymore.

I can't believe my fanless experience will end up such a failure. Does it sound like I'm really gonna need a noisy fan around to avoid those things?

Hey, thanks a lot for your advice. Really, I would never think that it could have something to do with overheating.

 

[Munky]

It doesn't have to be a noisy fan. A high quality heatsink can have a slow-spinning quiet fan and still provide much better cooling than a fanless heatsink.

 

[BadOmen]

That card doesn't fit an optional fan. It's designed to be fanless.

So, my only option seems to be ghetto-rigging some fan to it, don't have a clue how. Maybe rubber bands. Rats........

 

[BadOmen]

Well, just an update: it's definitely the fan. However, funny enough, my northbridge is far hotter than the videocard itself.

Anyway, I'm gonna get a little 40mm fan and adapt to the card. Now, does anyone know some some kind of very simple fan controller that also has an on/off switch? It's not a matter of keep the fan running slow, I want to be able to shut it off when I'm not playing. Does Fanmate do that?

Any input appreciated. Thanks again.

 

[Denithor]

Actually I would recommend "ghetto-rigging" a large (120mm) fan to blow over the passive heatsink instead of a 40mm fan mounted directly on the heatsink. The larger fan will move more air and do it much more quietly. You could perhaps use bread bag twist ties or get some plastic zip-lock bands to mount the fan. If it can blow across both the video card and northbridge heatsink that would be even better.

Perhaps mount the fan toward the front of the case and take out a couple of the rear pci covers so the hot air is expelled from the case.

Another option is to try to sell that card and pick up something actively cooled (could upgrade to a more powerful card also if desired).

 

[BadOmen]

Yes, I agree that the passive cooling dream didn't work properly.

Well, I bought a Zalman bracket & fan (I think its the FB123). The fan is a 90mm, and the bracket holds it close to gpu and northbridge, although half of it points to the memory. But I can set that up better. Otherwise, ghetto-rigging would be funny too.

Here's how it looks now:
http://i222.photobucket.com/al...photos/omenrig001.jpg

Well, now the 3d applications last longer, but at some point, everything starts to fall apart. It doesn't crash anymore, but games get unplayable with all the visual mess.

I wonder if that's a problem with the Catalyst. I tried installing the new ATI drivers, but there's a problem with the Catalyst. I'll read other threads here to find out if a solution has been found. Maybe it's not only the temps.

A 120mm fan to place on that bracket is my next step. for sure. And I ordered a Rheobus to be able to shut it off whenever not needed.

 

[BadOmen]

RATS!!!!!!:frown:

I have a 90mm Zalman fan pointing at the graphic card and a little at the northbridge too.

And yet, last night Operation Flashpoint crashed the system completely and out of nothing, no screen tips before the disaster.

What now? Would some of the hotfixes for newer games help with that? Maybe the new Catalyst? Or just a bigger fan?