is my Radeon 9700 busted?

[magnulus]

I have a Radeon 9700 Pro I've had for a year. For some odd reason, it
crashes every hour or so of use with Internet Explorer. I can't surf the
web any more without my computer locking up for about a minute, the screen
going black, and it comming back in 4 bit colors, and a message pops up
saying Windows detected a hardware failure. I've tried two different driver
sets, and the same thing happens in both. It keeps reporting a failure with
atiavg2d.dll (I think, I could be wrong on the exact name)... which I assume
is a 2D graphics driver?

Any advice? Should I buy a new card? If I had to get a new card, I'd
probably go for a GeForce of some kind, I don't want to spend 300 dollars on
another card...

 

[magnulus]

It sounds like the video cards is defective, but do you have the opportunity
to try another card to ensure things are good with the AGP slot? That said,
what kind of warranty do you have on your video card? I'd go that route
first if you have warranty rather than buy a new card.

I tried a new motherboard driver. It locked up once in the 5 hours since,
so I'm crossing my fingers. Who knows... I hate spending 300 dollars on a
videocard.

I bought it in August last year, and it's registered with ATI, so you tell
me... .. is it under warranty? I've delt with ATI's RMA's before and it's a
pain...

Frankly, I'm thinking of going with NVidia if I got a replacement, just
because the Radeon 9700 doesn't run one of my favorite games right (Rally
Masters and Blade of Darkness) and the NVidia most likely will. Something
nice n' cheap, maybe a GeForce 4...

 

[markOpolis]

I have a brand new Radeon 9500pro 128Mo, and I get the same 640*480 4bits
reset, very randomly, from now and then... But I also have instability
issues with my mainboard, so I don't know which is to be blamed!!!...

Some claim, it's power supply insufficiency.

Some fixed it by unplugging the card, cleaning it, especially the golden
pins making contact with the AGP slot.

Some others say it's Catalyst 3.4 bug! I have just removed it and installed
Omega Catalyst 3.5 drivers. Time will tell if I can get stable that way...

Try uninstalling your drivers. Then use Driver Cleaner from Driver Heaven to
be sure you erase every odd old driver files!
http://www.driverheaven.net/

 

[John Smith]

I had the very same problem and I called ATI and asked about this. They had
JUST released the Catalyst 3.6 and this took care of it some, until I
noticed it again. I looked everywhere for answers and noticed that alot of
people who have their system set up as RAID get this error or problem mostly
(such as me, works great without RAID). I removed one of my hard drives and
it hasn't had any problems what so ever. I emailed Soyo (my motherboard
manuf.) ATI (for my 9700pro) and High-Point (for the RAID controller driver)
and told them to get together and figure this one out. Soyo sent me a NEW
RAID controller driver for the onboard RAID controller and I have yet to try
it, but will post the result here when I get done. I have had all the
problems just like you, with the computer locking up and having to reset and
also with the computer pausing and resetting to 4-bit colors and 640x480
resolution.

good luck and maybe this will help some of you also.

Pentium 4 2.53GHz
Soyo P4X400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Edition
Corsair CMX512 - 3200C2PT 512MB DDR400 PC3200 XMS
(2) Maxtor 80GB 8MB Hard drives in RAID0 ...now just one at this moment on
IDE 1.
ATI built Radeon 9700 PRO