Screen goes black with ATI Radeon 1950 and VISTA Ultimate?

[Harry Krause]

I'm searching a little more far afield for this answer to this one, a
problem plaguing my buddy.

I posted this in the "hardware devices" subforum, but it doesn't get
nearly the traffic this subforum gets, so here goes:

One of my buds went ahead and got himself a new system to run VISTA,
similar to mine. He's got an ATI Radeon 1950 graphics card and says that
every so often while playing the "extras" poker game and sometimes while
in his web browser, his screen goes BLACK for a few seconds and then
comes back.

Connections are tight, he sez.

He's tried turning "AERO" on and off.

Couple of posters suggested this was problem with the current ATI
driver, so he posted a query with ATI but so far no responded.

Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

I'm searching a little more far afield for this answer to this one, a
problem plaguing my buddy.

I posted this in the "hardware devices" subforum, but it doesn't get
nearly the traffic this subforum gets, so here goes:

One of my buds went ahead and got himself a new system to run VISTA,
similar to mine. He's got an ATI Radeon 1950 graphics card and says that
every so often while playing the "extras" poker game and sometimes while
in his web browser, his screen goes BLACK for a few seconds and then
comes back.

Connections are tight, he sez.

He's tried turning "AERO" on and off.

Couple of posters suggested this was problem with the current ATI
driver, so he posted a query with ATI but so far no responded.

Any ideas?

Unless this is a hardware fault, almost 100% sure this will be a
driver issue. Vista drivers are still a bit flakey.

 

[Dale White]

I have the 1900XTX and I've not seen any random or occasional video
flickers. The few times I do, see a flick, that sounds like what you're
seeing is when starting video games, the ATI CCC likes to do a video
refresh\Sync kinda thing. This is more the case,where I run my desktop at
1024x768 and I might be running at game at 1600x1200.

The latest drivers are on ATI website and they are the Cat 7.2. If he hasn't
already, then I would suggest starting with installing those.
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista32/common-vista32.html

Also, if he hasn't run a full screen, 3Dgame, he could download 3dmark05 or
06 from http://www.futuremark.com/download/ and let that run. If the game
flickers during the demo or testing, I would then guess maybe a flaky card,
or possibly a bad monitor. Maybe the resolution is too high or the refresh
rate is too high. I had a old 17" CRT that made a crackling sound and would
doing a screen flicker off and on, whenever I ran at 85Hz, running at 75Hz,
fixed the issue.

 

[watercress_soup]

I occasionally had a similar problem on win xp with a geforce fx 5600. Sorry
i never figured out how to solve it. It was very, very intermittent so i
couldn't work it out by a process of elimination.

On my new machine my screen goes black after resuming from hibernation. The
screen appears for 1 second then goes black. If I move my mouse then the
screen appears. I have a Geforce Go 7300. I find win xp resuming from
hibernation to be brilliant, turns on and works straight away. But i am
guessing i have this problem with vista as its still early days.

steve

 

[Guest]

Just a thought, this also might be heat related. Check the card and
MB fans are working?

 

[Harry Krause]

Just a thought, this also might be heat related. Check the card and
MB fans are working?

Yup. And I just ran 3Dmark-06 and it completed successfully. Though I
have no idea whether those tests would indicate a hardware problem.
Damned nice visuals, especially the "blimp" and dragon.

 

[Dale White]

If you had a true hardware problem, you should have seen screen flickers
during the demo. If the video card was overheating or had a bad memory chip,
you would have seem some discolorations, might of even gotten a crash of
3Dmark06 with a reference to D3D_Render.

If you were able to run the benchmark all the way through, without any
noticeable problems, then odds are back to it being a driver issue and less
likely a hardware issue

 

[Harry Krause]

If you had a true hardware problem, you should have seen screen flickers
during the demo. If the video card was overheating or had a bad memory chip,
you would have seem some discolorations, might of even gotten a crash of
3Dmark06 with a reference to D3D_Render.

If you were able to run the benchmark all the way through, without any
noticeable problems, then odds are back to it being a driver issue and less
likely a hardware issue

Thanks, the screen did black out momentarily between the various tests,
but I assumed this was because of "resets." There were no screen
flickers during each segment of each test.

 

[Dale White]

Yes, that's normal. In fact, you should have seen it kick back to the
desktop for about 2 secs and then off to the next test.

 

[Harry Krause]

Yes, that's normal. In fact, you should have seen it kick back to the
desktop for about 2 secs and then off to the next test.

Well, we sent an email off to ATI tech support. Hope we get a reasonable
response.

Thanks.

 

[Harry Krause]

Well, we sent an email off to ATI tech support. Hope we get a reasonable
response.

Thanks.

Still no feedback from ATI. Just for grins, I lowered screen resolution
from 1600x1200 to 1250x1024 and just like magic, the "screen goes black"
problem went away.

Problem is, this is a Samsung 214t monitor and its native resolution is
1600x1200. Worked perfectly well under XP with an nVidia card at
1600x1200. So, I really suspect it is a driver problem.

Be nice if I heard from ATI sometime...

 

[Dale White]

I'd honestly be surprise if oyu got any "real' feedback, normally you just
those cut and paste answers from the FAQ section.

Maybe it's something with the video card and montior not jiving right (still
could be drivers) I have the X1900XTX and play certain games at 1600x1200
and haven't come across any screen flickering to black.

The good news is, the 7.3 drivers should be out any day. maybe you'll get
lucky the fix will be in there.


"> Still no feedback from ATI. Just for grins, I lowered screen resolution

 

[Harry Krause]

I'd honestly be surprise if oyu got any "real' feedback, normally you just
those cut and paste answers from the FAQ section.

Maybe it's something with the video card and montior not jiving right (still
could be drivers) I have the X1900XTX and play certain games at 1600x1200
and haven't come across any screen flickering to black.

The good news is, the 7.3 drivers should be out any day. maybe you'll get
lucky the fix will be in there.


"> Still no feedback from ATI. Just for grins, I lowered screen resolution

Arrgh. I was hoping to be able to work with someone at ATI on this, not
get their version of the famous Norton Utilities "read over these 75
pages and see if your problem is in here" response!
Thanks. I'll keep an eye out for 7.3 and report back.

 

[M]

Harry,

I'm running into a similar problem... (I'm not running Vista though, but XP Pro x64).

Basically, my ATI Radeon X1950XTX (512MB) went down ever since I started using my new 30" Dell 3007WFP.

One week after hooking up the monitor, I was running the card at its highest resolution (2560 x 1600) and all of a sudden I started noticing loss of signal to the monitor. At first I thought it was just a fluke, but then I started experiencing the same problem repeatedly until it got so bad that I could see garbled up text and white bands all over the screen even while booting the system (BIOS splash screen, BIOS itself and OS).

So I returned the card to ATI and the card and got a new one only to see the issue come up once again.

Of course this got me pretty upset so I tried contacting ATI's technical support only to find out that they don't know much about this problem (and that they are pretty rude too - one moron even hung up on me). Or if they do they won't tell me. Now they are says that the failure could be caused by some other component, but when I built my system I made sure I had all of the Crossfire certified components, from the power supply to the motherboard and even the memory.

So last night I put the new video card I got back into the system. To my surprise it worked fine, but again only for a few minutes. I finally started looking inside the case and I noticed that the card is way too hot. I haven’t had the chance to actually measure its temperature, but I’m pretty sure that it’s way out of whack and that this what’s causing the problem I’m seing.

I just told ATI about it and hopufully they'll be able to tell me what's going on.

So you might want to make sure that the Radeon is not getting to hot for you guys as well.

Cheers,
M.


EggHeadCafe.com - .NET Developer Portal of Choice
http://www.eggheadcafe.com