My Radeon 9700 pro is driving me insane!

[jools pwell]

I've had a Sapphire Radeon 9700 pro for about five months and I cannot get
it to run properly. Sure it will run all the normal Windows stuff but its so
unstable. My machine will constantly crash often causing reboots when I play
3D games in fact any game come to think of it.

Most people I've spoken to just say get the latest drivers. Well I've down
that. Catalyst drivers, AGP drivers, updated the Bios but to no avail. Could
it be that I not doing it in the right order? If so what is the right
order?

Could anybody help me with this? I'm real close to throwing the whole
machine out on to the street.


ASUS P4S8X-X mother
P4 2800
256 ram
Sapphire Radeon 9700 pro

Jools.......

 

[neon]

Sounds like your power supply is inadequate. Many people had trouble when
AMD processors first came out, lockups, crashes etc. Turns out a decent
power supply made them purr like a kitten..... Just a thought.

 

[rms]

1) Raise the AGP voltage 1 or 2 notches.
2) Run at AGP 4x in bios, and disable fastwrites.
3) Monitor the voltage rails, it might be a power supply issue.

rms

 

[Andrew Poyser]

i ve just brought a gigabyte radeon 9700 pro and i having problems.. right
when i installed the card i removed all remains of the nvidia drivers (even
from the registry) and then when into safe mode then removed the rest.
Then... rebooted got to the windows screen (XP) and found new hardware ask
if i wanted to install from wizard blah blah i said no and downloaded the
catalyst drivers 3.7 installed them rebooted

i then waited to reboot xp desktop came up and then i noticed the icons were
nice and smooth then when it said my personnel setting were been loaded all
the icons went funny like corrupt, it loaded up as normal then i tried to
play unreal tournament 2003 and all the graphics were funny like the
textures were being streached along the screen i can play FS2k4 but all the
writing is corrupt, even the writing is Fu@ked in this news group i m
getting like you jools ready to through it out the window. I m not sure if
its my power supply cos my computer don t crash.

my system

AMD xp2500
MSI KT3 Ultra bios 5.7
512ddr crucial DDR
230 psu (its old but my computer does nt freeze or lockup)

need help.......

 

[Thomas]

Andrew Poyser wrote:

230 psu (its old but my computer does nt freeze or lockup)

Come on...................................... An old 230 Watt PSU... you
cant expect your PC to behave correctly with that! Poor little thing. I have
heard people saving the last buck by not upgrading the PSU, but this is
really extreme ;-)

Really, please, for the sake of yr old PSU, run out and get yrself a 350-400
Watt PSU of a respectable brand, or a 400-500 Watt PSU of a less respectable
brand... I'd not be surprised if yr problems are cleared right up...

Thomas

 

[Andrew Poyser]

right i ve solved my problem at last the problem was not the power supply
(230w) not the drivers i m using 3.7 right now is was....

the bloody fastwrite which i disenabled in the bios and everything boots up
a dream. Ok i do realise my PSU is old and it works fine when i keep
everything clocked as normal but when i go to overclock then is goes tits up
i ve just brought a case waiting for it to arrive so i should be alright.
thanks for everyone help on this matter.......

 

[Angela Kahealani]

it works fine when i keep everything clocked as normal
but when i go to overclock then it goes tits up

That's why it's called overclocking...