Sapphire 9800 pro grief.

Callan

Apologies if this has been posted before, I’ve searched but couldn’t find anything.

Having problems with my new Sapphire 9800 pro 128mb with Doom 3. The game will play for 5 – 10 mins (at any setting) and crash with a message “Doom 3 needs to be shut down”, while the last second or so of sound loops.
I’ve also had problems with 3d mark 2003 crashing to the desktop about 1 out of 3 runs of it.
Far cry however works perfectly as does PES3.
I think I can rule out overheating as there are no artifacts and the heatsink is only warm to touch.

I did a fresh install of windows XP
I’ve installed the latest chipset drivers, tried different graphics drivers including the latest omega, Ran system at stock speed, fiddled with memory timings. Ran unreal tournament 2003 benchmark successfully
I ran memtest86 for a few hours with no errors, also ran prime 95 with no errors.
MY specs:
XP2500+ @ 3200+
Abit NF7 v2.0
2 x OCZ 256MB PC3200
Sapphire 9800 pro 128mb
Antec True Blue 480 watt psu
Windows xp home edition

Does anyone know what the problem might be, or have any suggestions I could use to rule the graphics card? Could it be a sound issue?

Thanks

dent

No idea whats causing your problem but ATI have brought out Catalyst 4.9betas
to increase game performance for Doom. Maybe give them a try.

daveg

Do you know anyone with another 9800pro? You could swop it out to totally rule out the graphics card.

Callan

No I dont know anyone else with a 9800pro. I suppose i could try the card in the family computer? Are there any other benchmarks I could run that might give an indications of the problem?

bambam

as an experiment you could install directx 9c, cat 4.9 beta drivers. Then use atitool (or other) to underclock your card. See if that fixes the problem or at least gets you beyond 5 - 10 mins Doom 3 playtime.

(Note: I realise D3 uses OGL but it does use Directx for sound and network I believe)

jesus_thats_gre

Doom3 was crashing out on me until I upgraded to the newest official cats.. using the beta ones now and its still fine

RuggieBear

jesus_thats_gre wrote:

Doom3 was crashing out on me until I upgraded to the newest official cats.. using the beta ones now and its still fine

Ditto...when i had to reinstall my 9800pro last night i used some older drivers and doom 3 crashed a few times before i remembered to install the latest official CATS...and bingo everything is cool. haven't tried the unofficial ones yet.

BKtje

May need to loosen the memory timings a bit. Depends on your setup tho.

(i had to loosen the timings for doom3/2k4 tho everything else ran flawlessly)