Radeon 9800 Pro Declining Performance

[mcp6453]

My son has a computer with an Intel motherboard, 3GHz Pentium 4, 1GB
memory, and Radeon 9800 Pro video card. When we first installed the card
more than a year ago, it worked great. Now, even though we have just
reinstalled XP Pro fresh, after a few seconds of play, the performance
declines from 100FPS to about 30FPS.

The computer does not have any spyware or viruses. Nothing has changed
in the configuration. Please give me some suggestions as to where we
should begin looking for a solution to the declining performance. We
already tried the drivers on the CD as well as the latest drives from
the web. I wonder if the card is not defective. How can I test it? It
works great when it is at 100FPS, so I hope it's not time to buy a new one.

 

[Paul_in_NC]

mcp6453,
Hmmmmmm... Here's my two cents,
The default ATI drivers that ship with XP aren't the most up to date.
In fact, they are quite stale
Have you downloaded the most recent XP drivers for your 9800pro from
ATI?
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=293

A second thought I just had pertains to the cooling solution that you
have for your 9800pro. You say that games start off with high fps, but
then slow down. This makes me think of the possibility that the GPU may
be overheating. This could be because the fan on the 9800pro has gone
bad (and is not doing its job of acting like the fan that blows on the
radiator of your car and you know how bad that can be for your cars
engine!) or that possibly that the heatsink/fan assembly (HSF) for your
9800pro has come loose and is not completely covering the GPU,
therefore not drawing the heat away from the GPU and causing it to act
erratically due to overheating.

If the HSF is bad or is broken then you have no worries because
aftermarket replacements are cheap and easy to install. If this is just
a matter of the drivers being inadequate then fixing that issue is
easily done. If none of these are the problem, then it is time to
escalate this to a level 2 tech.

Hope this helps!
Paul_in_NC

 

[Paul_in_NC]

mcp6453,
Hmmmmmm... Here's my two cents,

A thought I just had pertains to the cooling solution that you
have for your 9800pro. You say that games start off with high fps, but
then slow down. This makes me think of the possibility that the GPU may
be overheating. This could be because the fan on the 9800pro has gone
bad (and is not doing its job of acting like the fan that blows on the
radiator of your car and you know how bad that can be for your cars
engine!) or that possibly that the heatsink/fan assembly (HSF) for your
9800pro has come loose and is not completely covering the GPU,
therefore not drawing the heat away from the GPU and causing it to act
erratically due to overheating.

If the HSF is bad or is broken then you have no worries because
aftermarket replacements are cheap and easy to install. If this is just
a matter of the drivers being inadequate then fixing that issue is
easily done. If none of these are the problem, then it is time to
escalate this to a level 2 tech.

Hope this helps!
Paul_in_NC

 

[mcp6453]

Neither the heat sink nor the fan is defective. We cleaned the dust out,
and there is adequate flow around the chip. The performance, however,
continues to decline as the game is played. Unless anyone has any
suggestions, I have to assume that this quite expensive video card is
defective.

If I have to buy another card, what would anyone recommend, in this
price range? I bought an ATI "made" not "equipped" card anticipating
long life and good service. The card was great when it worked, but it is
very disappointing to have this problem arise.

 

[Jack F. Twist]

Your problem almost certainly has zilch to do with the 9800 Pro.
Are you running an AMD system? Especially one with a Via
chipset? Crap hardware like this is notorious for choking in
Windows after extended sessions.

 

[mcp6453]

Your problem almost certainly has zilch to do with the 9800 Pro.
Are you running an AMD system? Especially one with a Via
chipset? Crap hardware like this is notorious for choking in
Windows after extended sessions.

That's good to know. How can I troubleshoot? The motherboard is an Intel
D865 with an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor. The OS is Windows XP Pro
(brand new install) with all service packs and updates. The latest OEM
drivers have been installed for the motherboard and the peripherals.

I hope you're right. Now, how do I solve the problem?

 

[Barry Watzman]

Have you obtained and installed the latest Intel chipset drivers (for
the 865 chipset on the motherboard)? They are available on the Intel
web site. There is one huge driver set for all Intel chipsets (I think
it's InfInst_enu.exe or something like that).

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

Neither the heat sink nor the fan is defective. We cleaned the dust out,
and there is adequate flow around the chip. The performance, however,
continues to decline as the game is played. Unless anyone has any
suggestions, I have to assume that this quite expensive video card is
defective.

Have you checked the temperature of the card after the performance
starts to decline? The card can still get too hot even if the hardware
is working properly. I had to use a PCI slot cooler with my 9700 Pro to
cool it enough to play games.
Also you might want to use a program like Speedfan to monitor the
voltages while playing the game to see if the power supply is failing
under the load.

 

[Jack F. Twist]

That's good to know. How can I troubleshoot? The motherboard is an Intel
D865 with an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor. The OS is Windows XP Pro
(brand new install) with all service packs and updates. The latest OEM
drivers have been installed for the motherboard and the peripherals.

I hope you're right. Now, how do I solve the problem?

When frame rates start taking a dive, Ctrl-Esc out of the game you're
playing and then hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. Look at your memory usage stats,
and if your Commit Charge is at or anywhere near the total installed
memory in the system, you need to add more memory. What's
causing the slowdown is Windows swapping memory to its pagefile.

 

[mcp6453]

Have you obtained and installed the latest Intel chipset drivers (for
the 865 chipset on the motherboard)? They are available on the Intel
web site. There is one huge driver set for all Intel chipsets (I think
it's InfInst_enu.exe or something like that).

Yes

 

[mcp6453]

When frame rates start taking a dive, Ctrl-Esc out of the game you're
playing and then hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. Look at your memory usage stats,
and if your Commit Charge is at or anywhere near the total installed
memory in the system, you need to add more memory. What's
causing the slowdown is Windows swapping memory to its pagefile.

Why would this problem arise after the card has been in use for quite a
while? Same game, same computer, same monitor, same card, same memory.

 

[mcp6453]

Have you checked the temperature of the card after the performance
starts to decline? The card can still get too hot even if the hardware
is working properly. I had to use a PCI slot cooler with my 9700 Pro to
cool it enough to play games.
Also you might want to use a program like Speedfan to monitor the
voltages while playing the game to see if the power supply is failing
under the load.

It does seem temperature related, but I'm confident that the air flow
around the card is as good or better than it has ever been, and the card
used to work perfectly.

I'll probably install it in another computer to troubleshoot by process
of elimination.

 

[Jack F. Twist]

Why would this problem arise after the card has been in use for quite a
while? Same game, same computer, same monitor, same card, same memory.

Depends on the game. Some will eventually use upwards of 1.5GB
of memory as you play them, and if you don't have enough physical
RAM, Windows has to start swapping memory to disk. This can
effect frame rates.

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

It does seem temperature related, but I'm confident that the air flow
around the card is as good or better than it has ever been, and the card
used to work perfectly.

The easiest way to test the cooling of the card is to touch the card
when it starts to slow down. My 9700 Pro got almost too hot to touch
even though the temperatures in the rest of the computer were much
lower. The computer would usually drop out of the game to the desktop
without any error messages. I never noticed a slowdown, but as I was
running Morrowind which had enough other problems I might not have
noticed the slowing.

 

[greedo]

Your problem almost certainly has zilch to do with the 9800 Pro.
Are you running an AMD system? Especially one with a Via
chipset? Crap hardware like this is notorious for choking in
Windows after extended sessions.

right. like nforce has stellar performance. a big selling point
for the new nforce5 chipset is it fixes the data corruption issues
in nforce4. My via chipset has worked flawlessly from day one.

 

[mcp6453]

My son has a computer with an Intel motherboard, 3GHz Pentium 4, 1GB
memory, and Radeon 9800 Pro video card. When we first installed the card
more than a year ago, it worked great. Now, even though we have just
reinstalled XP Pro fresh, after a few seconds of play, the performance
declines from 100FPS to about 30FPS.

The computer does not have any spyware or viruses. Nothing has changed
in the configuration. Please give me some suggestions as to where we
should begin looking for a solution to the declining performance. We
already tried the drivers on the CD as well as the latest drives from
the web. I wonder if the card is not defective. How can I test it? It
works great when it is at 100FPS, so I hope it's not time to buy a new one.

The problem turned out to be dust clogged heatsink on the CPU. After
cleaning out the dust, removing the old hard thermal paste between the
heatsink and CPU and reapplying fresh thermal paste, the problem went
away. The video card is fine.