Blank screen crashes -- really weird

[Vin]

I'm getting random lockups in 3d games -- opengl (call of duty demo) / d3d
(3dmark03) -- the screen just goes blank after 10-40 mins of
playing/testing. It doesnt seem like the application has crashed though, as
i can hear the sounds in call of duty (when i press the fire button for
example) BUT it appears like the monitor has entered into a power saving
mode or something -- its very weird!

Sometimes i can press the standby button on the pc and then on pressing
spacebar the monitor will come alive again. BUT as i said it's all very
weird.

I'm using the latest catalyst 3.8 drivers, via 4.49s, winxpsp1, have a
430watt antec psu, have my xp2400+ cooled to a decent 45C, my hecules radeon
9600 pro has a large cooler with ram heatsinks, my ddr ram has been tested
for 24hrs using memtest86, etc etc

Previously i was using catalyst 3.4 and was very happy with its
performance/stability except in Halo (where i experienced random hard
lockups) and C&C Generals. Since i wanted to play C&C Generals, i upgraded
to catalyst 3.8 a few days ago and am now experiecing these strange errors.

can this be caused by fastwrites (using catalyst 3.4 i never saw the
smartgart tab in display properties, even though sisoft sandra/dxdiag
mentioned that fastwrites/agp texture acceleration was on and my agp was set
at 8x transfer speed). using catalyst 3.8s i can now see the smartgart tab
and it's set to: fastwrites enabled and 8x agp.

any suggestions??

best,
vin

ps: and yes, everything is disabled in control panel > power options

 

[JAD]

turn fast writes off

 

[Vin]

I'm getting random lockups in 3d games -- opengl (call of duty demo) / d3d

(3dmark03) -- the screen just goes blank after 10-40 mins of
playing/testing. It doesnt seem like the application has crashed though, as
i can hear the sounds in call of duty (when i press the fire button for
example) BUT it appears like the monitor has entered into a power saving
mode or something -- its very weird!

Sometimes i can press the standby button on the pc and then on pressing
spacebar the monitor will come alive again. BUT as i said it's all very
weird.

Previously i was using catalyst 3.4 and was very happy with its
performance/stability except in Halo (where i experienced random hard
lockups) and C&C Generals. Since i wanted to play C&C Generals, i upgraded
to catalyst 3.8 a few days ago and am now experiecing these strange errors.

i think this has to do with the vpu recovery feature in the cat 3.8s -- i
uninstalled 3.8 and installed 3.6 and now face hard lockups, doesn't solve
my problem, but definitely makes it less weird.

can this be caused by fastwrites (using catalyst 3.4 i never saw the
smartgart tab in display properties, even though sisoft sandra/dxdiag
mentioned that fastwrites/agp texture acceleration was on and my agp was set
at 8x transfer speed). using catalyst 3.8s i can now see the smartgart tab
and it's set to: fastwrites enabled and 8x agp.

i tried disabling fastwrites -- no luck. in fact i experienced some funny
texture tearing in 3dmark01 and also noticed some corruption of my windows
mouse pointer. anyways, bottom line is that disabling fast writes didnt
help.

moving on, i had read about some via chipsets not supporting 8x agp
properly -- so i decided to use smartgart to notch down my agp to 4x -- i
didnt think this would help as i was using 8xagp and fastwrites with my
catalyst 3.4 drivers, but i was running out of options.

AND it worked! using agp 4x, i have been able to run 10-loops in 3dmark01
and 3dmark03 without problems. I even loaded call of duty and played that a
few times, and there were no lockups.

I can only presume that the catalyst 3.4s didnt really enable agp 8x mode
with my radeon 9600pro (and kt400 mobo) even though sisoft stated that both
fastwrites and agp 8x were enabled.

anyways, the only way i've been able to successfully use catalyst 3.4+
drivers is to run at agp 4x -- hope this info helps somebody.

vin

 

[JAD]

when you enable and disable fastwrites, I have noticed that if you do this from within the software and not the bios , FW doesn't
get disabled in some cases.

 

[Dave]

i think this has to do with the vpu recovery feature in the cat 3.8s -- i
uninstalled 3.8 and installed 3.6 and now face hard lockups, doesn't solve
my problem, but definitely makes it less weird.




i tried disabling fastwrites -- no luck. in fact i experienced some funny
texture tearing in 3dmark01 and also noticed some corruption of my windows
mouse pointer. anyways, bottom line is that disabling fast writes didnt
help.

moving on, i had read about some via chipsets not supporting 8x agp
properly -- so i decided to use smartgart to notch down my agp to 4x -- i
didnt think this would help as i was using 8xagp and fastwrites with my
catalyst 3.4 drivers, but i was running out of options.

That doesn't surprise me at all. The VIA AGP implementation is flawed in
general and there have been complaints and problems from many people (check
out the VIA forums). I can't believe that VIA haven't sorted it out for
AGP8. The last VIA board I will own will be the last. Next time it'll be
an Nvidia mainboard if I stick with AMD or an Intel board.