Sapphire X800XL 512 Crashing System

[D6Veteran]

I need help figuring out if it is the card or something else.

Basically I bought the components for the system listed in my sig. I built and installed everything, ran memtest and the latest drivers. Everything AOK.

I installed CoD2 and ran the game for a whole day and had a blast no problems.

Then I installed xfire and firefox. When using xfire if I click around on it long I crash my system. When using firefox I crashed the system while resizing the window.

I reinstalled windows and everything and got the same crash. CoD2 thought still runs fine. I cannot reproduce the crash in any windows OS application like windows explorer or IE.

The crash: basically the screen freezes *except* I can still move the mouse. Then after about 10 seconds the screen goes black, my HD shuts off but the mobo is still on and fans are still on. Computer needs to be reset to boot.

I rolled back the ATI drivers to 5.9 and 5.7 and in 5.7 I was able to interupt the crash with a windows message that basically says a device has failed and was shut down. My screen then goes back to 600x800 and 8 colors.

I tired the omega drivers as well and got the same issue.

I'm about to RMA the card, but I cannot help wondering why the system crashes in any application I install except CoD2 runs FLAWLESSLY. I played it again all weekend with not a single burp.

This makes me think it is a driver issue rather than a card issue. But if it is a driver issue then I don't know what the solution is - except maybe try another type of card.

Any help appreciated.

 

[ayabe]

Do you have the latest BIOS?

Do you have latest chipset drivers?

Are you overclocking either the card or any other component in your system?

Have you run a scandisk on your harddrive?

 

[D6Veteran]

Originally posted by: ayabe
Do you have the latest BIOS?

Do you have latest chipset drivers?

Are you overclocking either the card or any other component in your system?

Have you run a scandisk on your harddrive?

I do have the latest BIOS, and I flashed it according to the DFI instructions.

I do have the latest nvidia chipset drivers and I installed them according to the DFI guys on DFI-Street.

Nothing is being overclocked at this time. Everything is brand new and set up stock.

I have not run scandisk on my hard-drive - you think it could be the HD? That's interesting cuz the one thing I have noted is that the crash shuts down the HD but leaves everything else on from what I can tell (the fan on the vid card is on as well as the case fan and cpu fan).

 

[ayabe]

At this point anything is possible you have to try and eliminate the possibilities one by one. I haven't had this happen in a while but back in the day having VPU recover on in the ATI drivers would cause problems for me, like causing the videocard driver to crash when it shouldn't have so I always turn it off, that might be something else to try.

If you made any changes to any of the BIOS settings(IRQ's etc.) you might want to set Optimized Defaults if your board has such an option, if it's stable go ahead and reapply your changes one by one.

 

[D6Veteran]

I should add that at one point I removed the X800XL, and installed a regular old pci Rage card. I could not reproduce the crash with that card. I have two PCIe slots on the motherboard, so after I determined that the system was ok with the Rage card, I put the X800XL in the second PCIe slot. Again the machine would crash.

So in my eyes I've eliminated a bad PCIe slot and narrowed on the vid card. I guess my concern now, is whether to RMA the card with new egg or simply replace it with another card. I honestly don't know if the card is defective or if their is some sort of conflict between the card and my system.

Do you think I am correct in having narrowed it down to the card based on the test with the Rage card?