Some problems and need suggestions

Lord Nikon

Okay, ever since I installed my new GPU "ATI Radeon 5770", my PC has been playing silly bugger.

When I first installed the card, I didn't remove any nVidia drivers. Sound on PC was fine, but Battlefield 2 quality wasn't great. So, with some advice on here, I ran Driver Sweeper to remove all nVidia drivers. I also installed the latest ATI drivers.

Here of some of the symptoms I am having now after all that...

1. PC is crashing to blank monitor, but PC is on, not restarting. This happens frequently or infrequently as you like, even if I'm just on Firefox, and not playing any game. (I have to hold in the PC power button to get a reboot.)

2. When rebooted, I get a "Black Screen of Death", with System Boot Error. I get to 2 options. 1) Hit Del to enter setup, or 2) F1 to continue. I hit 2 because I know very little about setup.

3. Sound is either gone completely, or is crap at best, both through headset and speakers. I'm using onboard sound with Soundmax drivers, which I hate, because support or updates for this Soundmax stuff in next to non-existant.

4. When playing Battlefield 2(I've tried running it a few times). CPU usage through my G15 screen is high 90%. It wasn't so high with old GPU (8800gts). Now, I have set almost everything to max in BF2, but upon reading reviews of my new GPU which can handle most games on max settings, why is my CPU maxed out?


That's it in a nutshell.
I have some thoughts already, but i would like some thoughts to confirm what I think it might be. Also, I'm sick to death with this Soundmax crap. Suggestions on better/different drivers would be great, or even a stand alone sound card, or equivalent. Below is my current spec. FYI, I have not overclocked either the CPU or the GPU.

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, 3.0GHz
Memory: 4052MB RAM
Hard Drive: 244 GB
Video Card: RADEON HD 5770 1GB DX11 VAPOR-X Overclock Edition
Monitor: Benq 22" lcd
Sound Card: SoundMAX HD Audio
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Motherboard: ASUS M2N SLi - Deluxe
PSU: NorthQ 400w

StopNotWorking

Well your cpu also processes game data so the higher the settings the more the cpu will have to work, the cpu generally handles physics and pushes all the graphical calculations to the gpu. So considering the cpu I'm not too worried about it running that high, BC2 likes quad cores so it pushes dual cores that much harder.

Regarding the random shut downs.. could be any number of things, did it only start happening when you got the new GPU? Possibly a power supply issue but I can't see a 5770 using much more power than an 8800GTs.

I'd take a guess that the sound drivers could be conflicting with the hdmi audio drivers on the gpu. I had a lot of issues with them on XP with my ati card, any dirt cheap sound card should do the trick, just as long as it supports modern OSs. All this stuff only started happening when you put the new gpu in? A fresh install of windows is always a good idea when doing a hardware upgrade

Deano12345

Sounds like a PSU issue to me (esp. with the random crashes) although a 5770 does use MUCH less power than a 8800GTS. Since your card is pre overclocked, try backing the clocks down to stock and see if that helps.

Another thing you could do is use HWMonitor to tell how much power you are using, it might not work on your system but it is worth a shot.

Are you using HDMI, that could be the source of the sound problem as NVidia cards dont nativley carry HDMI W/Sound (they require this pass through cable) where the ATi cards do. Again, sounds driver related to me.

ATi have been having problems with their 5xxx cards on the latest drivers, so I'd recommend going to slightly older drievr to see if that helps the problem. BF : BC2 will push dual cores very hard as they like quads so nothing to worry about there.

A clean Windows install is probably your best bet at this stage however, it'll solve most of your problems I'd say