Faulty 9700 Pro?

[Mark Epps]

Guys,

I have just requested an RMA from overclockers uk to return a hercules 9700
Pro card.

Before I hear back from them and send the card off, anyone have any ideas
what could be the matter?

original system was a ga7vaxp mobo, amd2800 cpu, 1Gb pc2700 ram, a couple of
hard drives,
a couple of cdrw's and 5 cooling fans. Original psu was a q-tec 550W.

Typical case temp was 36C, cpu 43C.

Always had problem with display on MOHAA (black areas of the sky), but
everything else was OK.
Then, games started to lock up (SOF2, MOHAA, breakthru & spearhead, fs2002,
cfs3).
Started getting vpu recovery warnings and even a corrupt screen (black with
random horizontal lines)

Messed about with settings, but still they locked up.
Thought it might be the psu as q-tec are cheap and nasty.
Fitted an Enermax 460 psu - same problems.
Swapped the mobo for a GA7n400 Pro2 - same problems

Fitted a ge force2 graphics card - everything runs perfectly (although at
lower
settings of course).

I'm sure that this points to the hercules 9700 pro being the 'culprit', what
do you think?
(Overclockers uk will charge me for testing and shipping if they get the
board back and find nothing wrong with it)

thanks for any advice

Mark

 

[John Boy]

Have you tried Catalyst 3.9 (or Omega 2.4.96c) drivers and DirectX 9.0b?
Does that motherboard support Fast Writes and AGP 8X and what are those set
at in Smart GART? Your case temperature looks high, I wonder if that is
leading to problems? Are you running at the default core and memory speeds
on the 9700 Pro? What does the 9700 details show - Options tab | Details
button?

John

 

[Mark Epps]

Have tried cat 3.6 - 3.9 incl.
Have tried latest omega drivers
DX9.0b installed
have tried fast write on and off
have set agp to 4x and 8x (and in the bios)
have tried various agp aperture settings in bios
have tried various opengl settings
No overclocking of gpu or cpu
have tried smartgart on and off (what is smartgart anyway?)
Couldn't tell you what options/details show as I have now uninstalled the
9700 pro and installed the nvidia ge force 2

 

[John Boy]

Sounds as though you've covered the bases. I mentioned the Details as a
friend has a 9700 Pro that shows the AGP bus setting as 0 in Details. That
seems to be caused by something in his set up, as removing the drivers with
Driver Cleaner and reinstalling the drivers doesn't clear it but, on a clean
install of XP it runs without a problem.

John

 

[Mark Epps]

Dear John Boy,

I forgot to mention that I also did a clean install of WXP as well!.

I am pretty confident that I've tried everything, I just didn't want to
incurr charges because I'd missed something daft.

Mark