On 4 May 2004 08:53:18 -0700,
(E-Mail Removed) (Spondy) wrote:
>I've had a 9800 Pro for about a month and everything has worked very
>well. Played the entire Far Cry Game and many hours of Battlefield
>Vietnam/UT2004. Yesterday when loading a game (BFV) my monitor
>suddenly went blank.
>
>I thought well just a glitch...this game is know to have some
>bugs...although it had been running perfectly for 2 weeks prior. I
>rebooted and the game started and ran...for about 30 seconds then it
>dropped me into a reboot of the system. I thought that the drivers
>had been "blown out" which had happened to me years ago with a
>different card. I reinstalled. Same problem crashed to desktop with
>30 secs of play.
>
>I then went to install the 4.4 catalyst drivers....still same problem.
> I thought that perhaps the game was the problem.... so I tried
>another....Wolfenstein Enemy Territory.... 30 secs in crashed to a
>reboot. I am dreading a serious issue with the card.
>
>Am I missing anything how else should I proceed to figure out what is
>going on? I'd think it was heat, but when it initially happened the
>system had been off all day. I don't think it can get that hot that
>quick.. Maybe I'm wrong.
>
>When XP reboots it reports that it has "recovered from a serious
>problem" and dumps some undecipherable information into a "minidump"
>folder. I've done some research and I'm really at a loss an how to
>proceed.
>
>
>Any and I mean Any help would be appreciated.
If anybody has a solution for this that doesn't involve an RMA from
Ati, I'd be surprised. And glad. I pretty much have the same problem.
Happened about a month into my Radeon 9800 Pro too.
Didn't even start with a 3d game either. I was playing a wmv clip in
media player when the screen went blank and my monitor reported 'Sync
out of range'. Thought nothing of it and rebooted, and next thing I
know, Farcry would not even run. As soon as I loaded a save point,
it'll crash to either the desktop, or else blue screen with
ati2dvg.dll often being the culprit.
UT2004 (demo) lasts about 5 seconds before locking up; a little bit
longer if the system had been left to cool down overnight. Even the
original UT can't complete the opening flyby without crashing. Ambient
temperature inside the case as reported by MBM 5 reads around 33-35C
pretty much all the time. Left case open (room temp is around 20C), no
go. Heat sink on video card does feel really warm, even after only a
few minutes of any kind of 3d. Fan is still working as far as I can
see.
Just to rule out any heat related issues, used the omega drivers and
underclocked both the core and memory to something really ridiculously
low (I think I went all the way down to under 300Mhz), and it still
crashed or locked up after a few seconds. What's worse is that while
normal 2d stuff works fine, I started noticing some artifacts when
viewing movie clips or watching tv through the pci tv wonder card.
About my only hope is that it's my power supply that's not able to
supply enough juice. It's only a 300W Antec, and there's a goodly
amount of stuff hooked up to it -- 4 ide hdd's, 1 optical drive, amd
xp1800+, 2 sticks of pc133 sdram (yes, I still have an old Asus A7V133
mb), aforementioned tv wonder, sb live, usb wireless nic and 5 sets of
fans blowing everywhere. Still doesn't explain why things worked
perfectly fine for a good month though.
Have pretty much gone through the entire software solution route, but
I really doubt if it's s/w related. Pretty sure the other components
in my pc, although aged, are still working. Plunked my old Geforce4
MX440 in, and no crashes whatsoever.
Just for kicks, I put the Radeon in another test machine, this one a
P4 1.6 with a 250W PS, but totally barebones with only one ide hdd
attached and nothing else. 3dmark 2001 lasted, oh, up to the end of
the first test, and machine locked up.
Haven't had time to try the card out in another pc, this one a
barebone p4 2.8 with 300W sparkle PSU, but I don't have much
confidence. Good chance the card is toast.
Good luck.