ATI 9800 problem in games

mobby

Just replaced by old Graphic card for a new ati pro 9800, however having problems with games example Far Cry /Call of duty crash after about 1 min either lock up the PC black screen or crash back to desktop Command and Conquer having screen corruption best described as flashing red squares on parts of the screen, Have all the up to date patches for the games very latest drivers for ATi card system is a P4, 1gb DDR ram,
Asus P4SDX Motherboard, w2k sp4, DX9b, did a clean install of w2k on a 2nd drive i have in PC and same problem with Far Cry, I installed the Card on a Dell P4 i have in work and the games worked fine so its not the Video card, I think it maybe the Asus board and the AGP driver (latest version of this driver) but looking for a bit of advice before i go and change the board, (think I’ll stick with Intel boards in future) card works fine in W2k plays DVD, etc, fine, and when i put my old GF4 back in games ran ok, rambling on a bit here but i am a bit pissed off atm,
Any one assist?

Mutant_Fruit

powersupply maybe...

And try disabling fastwrites if you can. Next to no performance gain, but more problems with crashing.

mobby

Tried Disable of Fast- write made no difference , I have a 300w Powersupply which is what is recommended .

joePC

Could be the powersupply or just over heating.

Doggy power supply can cause loads of problems.

How old is it.

Thanks JoePC

Mutant_Fruit

I had that exact problem with my 9600pro with my older powersupply (200watt). It works fine in my 350watt.

What brand is your powersupply? If its a crap brand, then its morethe likely a power supply problem. If its Antec or something good, its not the powersupply.

mobby

Advance 300w PSU its about 2 years old ,

Ok I shall try a new PSU to see if it makes a difference.


Thanks to all replys.

Sir Random

Did you fully uninstall the nVidia drivers (with Det destroyer or Driver Cleaner) before installing the new card & drivers?
Are you using Cat 4.5s?

TacT

PSU

mobby

Did you fully uninstall the nVidia drivers (with Det destroyer or Driver Cleaner) before installing the new card & drivers?

Yep used Driver Cleaner to remove nvidia drivers, But problem still the same.

The strange thing is on the Dell PC I have in work which ran the games the PSU is only 230watts. Anyway I will purchase a 400w PSU on Tuesday and see what happens.

Mutant_Fruit

230watt, that explains everything.

the 9800 needs a bit more power than a 9600, and my 9600 had severe problems on a 200watt power supply... Looks like my first guess was right.

mobby

Just to clarify Mutant

Installed Ati pro 9800 in Home PC with a 300w PSU games wont run.
Installed then on Dell Gx270 Work PC with a 230w games will run. thats what i find strange. I even removed the Power connectionn from Floppy drive, 2nd hard disc , and Zip drive, to put less drain on PSU without any joy.

Mutant_Fruit

oh right, i thought it was the other way round. That is strange...

quarryman

Originally posted by Mutant_Fruit


the 9800 needs a bit more power than a 9600, and my 9600 had severe problems on a 200watt power supply... Looks like my first guess was right.

not true. a 9800 will run fine a shuttle PSU (~200watts). it really depends on the quality of the power supply.

Stephen

It also depends on what the load on the PSU is. A shuttle's PSU won't have a whole lot of hardware drawing power from it, and its high quality as mentioned. Whereas some manky Qtec PSU in a large tower with lots of drives and peripherals etc is going to have a heavy load that it can't sustain on it.

Dman_15

What is everyones problem with QTec?
They dont claim to be the worlds greatest psu and they are priced accordingly.
I have had a 550w, for about 8 months powering 2x120gb hd, 2xdvd drives, An an oc'd xp2700 and 9800pro also oc'd with about 6 case fans, floppy drive, case lights, hardcano etc etc.
Its great, very stable voltages, well within 5%. And at third of the price of the antecs and zalamans i dont see what the problem is.

[CrimsonGhost]

Well I'm beginning to think my 450w Qtec could be my problem. I've an athlon 64 machine, Only card in the MSI motherboard is a 9600. One 120Gb Sata drive and a plextor dvd/cd burner, and just 2 case fans. But still getting irregular crashes. I'm going to try another power supply and see if it makes a difference. I've tested all the hardware except it thorougly and they are fine. Temps of both CPU and GPU well within limit, and no over-clocking going on whatsoever.

Originally posted by Dman_15
What is everyones problem with QTec?
They dont claim to be the worlds greatest psu and they are priced accordingly.
I have had a 550w, for about 8 months powering 2x120gb hd, 2xdvd drives, An an oc'd xp2700 and 9800pro also oc'd with about 6 case fans, floppy drive, case lights, hardcano etc etc.
Its great, very stable voltages, well within 5%. And at third of the price of the antecs and zalamans i dont see what the problem is.

mobby

New 400watt power supply has made no difference, just tried far cry and command and conquer generals, C&C loads the level but locks up the PC after 2/3 mins. Far Cry locks up as soon as the level loads with a black screen but sound seems ok,

Knew I should have just brought a PS2!!

Stephen

What make is the 400W psu? My problem with QTec is that they are sh1t. They provide nowhere near their advertised power.

The_Conductor

Similar problems with a 9200.
Was even crashing out of Civ3- which was bloody ridiculous.
Cleaned the drivers and downloaded an older set of official drivers from ATI (not the OEM catalyst drivers that ship with the Hercules cards)- seems to have cleared up the probs. Had probs ensuring the original drivers were fully gone- ended up doing my driver install in VGA mode......

Also- what are people's probs with QTec- sure its not what it says on the packet- but its cheap and cheerful and it does the job. I have 2 hdd, a dvd burner, a seperate 52 speed cd burner, and then a seperate dvd player all on a QTec 450 Watt PSU- along with more neon lights and other gadgetry than I care to mention. Its smack bang in the middle of its rated output- and working fine.

A thought I would like to add- is the power here in Dublin is going rapidly downhill. We have regular brownouts all over the city and county- sometimes several times a day. Seriously recommend anyone not already doing so, use a surge protector and a UPC.

mobby

PSU is A Jeantech

Surly if it was a poor PSU the everything would be effected but DVD,s play superb, quality is far crisper the my old card even in intense action modes. windows runs fine no screen Corruption. Its either a problem with the SIS chipset/motherboard or poor drivers , Search of the net has various problems with said games and ATI cards with some people having similer crashes to my own but no on seems to have a answer.
Also would ATI not have to state on the box that only a recommended PSU from whatever company will run these cards, on mine it just says 300w or greater is required no mention of any brand.

Sir Random

The "red squares flashing" sounds like a driver problem, but games crashing to desktop is usually caused by system ram flaking out (if not gfx card/psu). Try running Prime95 and/or memtest86.

mobby

Tried prime95 passed ok, Just removed ATI drivers reinstalled them again with DX9
and sp4 again!! the game now loads fine no flashing red sq but it still hangs about 1/2 mins after loading a level

GinjaNinja

I had the same probs winth one of my old Nvidia cards on Win2k SP3.

The main problem was the RAM. Make sure there is no dust, seated in the correct bays always user slot 1 & 2 beofre slot 3.
update m'board bios.
update chipset drivers. Your m'boards mightn't handle 8/x that well..

man there loads of options. but start with the RAM and m'board dirvers.

mobby

Tried different ram same thing I have the latest drivers, patches etc available for every component, I have put me old GF4 TI4800 back in and everything works so that’s the way I will leave it until I can afford a new motherboard as this Asus P4sdx seems just not compatible with the ATI , I have tried the card on a Dell with Intel chipset and it work fine.

One thing i have just noticed is in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool under the Display tab

and DirectX features The AGP Texture Acceleration was greyed out and disabled with the ATI card but when I put the GF4 back in its not greyed out and enabled

CombatCow

Originally posted by mobby

and DirectX features The AGP Texture Acceleration was greyed out and disabled with the ATI card but when I put the GF4 back in its not greyed out and enabled

That would be the drivers for the agp slot then.

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4SDX

Do you have this agp driver version - 1.17 ?
SiS AGP WHQL Drivers for Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP



CombatCow

neXus9

I'm having frame rate problems with GTA vice city, at the moment. Seems to get very slow once I crash. Everything in my system is pretty fast.

mobby

yes i have the latest drivers 1.17

mobby

Guys still having this problem with Video card, however some games work others will hang eg FIFA 2004 plays fine, Tiger woods 2004 workks if i set video settings to Software or Hardware, if i change to 3d game will lock pc after 5/10 mins, Command and conquer locks pc after loading level, Far Cry goes to black screen but still have
sound for a minute before pc hangs, strange thing i have tried some of the latest game demos and they will play without any problems. i was thinking maybe the game demos work because they dont have to access the DVD/Rom drive and are not drawing power from the drive but its just a guess i dont think the card is faulty as it works fine in some games and 2d mode dvd's etc . and i rather not go and buy yet another PSU to find thats not the answer.

neXus9

Yeah it's either the PSU for me or the dvd drive. I think it's the dvd drive. I'm planning to get another PSU (a silent one) so I might go for the extra wattage.

¬zero64

make sure you have the proper connection to the 9800
it musst come from the (be connected to ) one of the 4 pin molex connectors as far as i remember because the 9800 uses a lot of power

BloodBath

Do you have a creative sound card?


BloodBath

Beno

i'am having the same problems with railroad tycoon 3 but far cry runs without a hitch
amd 64 and 9800pro

Mutant_Fruit

OK...

Latest chipset drivers, latest graphics card drivers, latest soundcard drivers.

Then try stepping back a version or two and see if that helps.

Then run memtest86 (i think its called). That will test your memory. Then the only other option is to borrow a different PSU and test that with your setup. I'm still banking on a PSU issue.

mobby

Tried a Brand New 550w PSU made no difference also changed DVD drive again no difference,

Yep BloodBath I do have a Creative Audigy 2 Pro Platinum Pro card why you ask?.

BloodBath

Audigy cards are known to cause crashing in some games. Try updating the drivers for it.

I had Far Cry for two weeks before I could actually play it because the sound card was the cause of it crashing.

I had to turn eax and hardware support off and now it runs fine.



BloodBath

mobby

yeah but FC plays ok when i put my GF4800 ti Card back in even with the Audigy card
I also tried it without the sound card installed same thing, thanks anyway.