X800 Gone South?

[DerekBaker]

My system has been unstable the last couple of weeks. There were lockups
and spontaneous reboots when doing a variety of things - playing videos
on youtube (with both Firefox and IE), scanning for viruses (NOD32),
imagining my hard drive (Acronis True Image) and others.

What evidence there was pointed to my vid card, a PowerColor X800 Pro
VIVO from Aug 2004 - flashed to 16 pipes and running at 520/560.
Sometimes there was an error message in Windows Event Viewer referring
to the driver, and sometimes, but not always, VPU Recover (first time
I've ever had a use for it) would prevent a reboot.

Just replaced it with my old Radeon 8500 and now the machine is rock
solid. Can run a bunch of the applications that caused problems before
at the same time without any problem. Only change other than the card,
is that I had to use pre-R300 6.11s, rather than the straight 6.11s I
had on my X800 - had tried a bunch of drivers from the latest back. Had
also taken the overclock off the card.

The X800 looks fine to the eye and most of the apps with problems put no
load on the card, so temps were fine.

Having said that the card yesterday reached 90C running ATI Tray Tool's
3D renderer, so I'm wondering if temps like those have reduced the
lifetime of the card?

 

[Kent_Diego]

There was a reason the your card was not originally sold as XT PE. I would
use ATI Tool and under clock GPU frequency to see if fixes and lowers
temperature.

 

[DerekBaker]

* Kent_Diego:

There was a reason the your card was not originally sold as XT PE. I would
use ATI Tool and under clock GPU frequency to see if fixes and lowers
temperature.

Have taken off the overclock, but as I said most of the apps with
problems did not stress the card - it was at about 40C.

Doesn't matter now anywhere: card provides no signal to the monitor.

 

[First of One]

Having said that the card yesterday reached 90C running ATI Tray Tool's 3D
renderer, so I'm wondering if temps like those have reduced the lifetime
of the card?

Probably. That, and you've activated pipelines that were deemed "broken" by
the manufacturer. Look at it this way: Left unmodified, the card would have
probably been replaced sooner due to technical obsolescence.

 

[DerekBaker]

* First of One:

Probably. That, and you've activated pipelines that were deemed "broken" by
the manufacturer. Look at it this way: Left unmodified, the card would have
probably been replaced sooner due to technical obsolescence.

'deemed "broken"' is not the same thing as broken. The card ran fine for
three years.

Anyway, an X1950GT should be here soon, to hold me over until a major
upgrade next year.