Graphics Card Crashing

[Lemonio]

These are my specs

> Manufacturer : Dell Dimension DIM4700

> Mainboard : Dell 0M3918

> Chipset : Intel i915G

> Processor : Intel Pentium 4 530J @ 3000 MHz

> Physical Memory : 1536 MB

> Video Card : ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series
HD3850 512 PCI-e

> Hard Disk : WDC (80 GB)

> CD-Rom Drive : SONY CDRW/DVD CRX330E

> Monitor Type : Dell Computer DELL E771a - 15 inches

> Network Card : Intel Corporation 82562EZ PRO/100 Ethernet Controller

> Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition 5.01.2600 Service Pack 2

> DirectX : Version 9.0c (July 2007)

Now i have a big problem and a multitude of possibilities.
Recently i have installed an HD3850. Now whenever i play most games, i often get a crash. Crash could happen instantly or in a few minutes depending on the game. Generally crash was my screen freezing, then turning black, sound vibrating, and occasionaly it would then go to a blue screen with an error message
my first error message was Your Graphics Processor got stuck in an infinite loop.
After reinstalling my drivers the blue screen error changed to an error with aticqag.dll or atidvag.dll
for a different reason i had to reinstall windows, and i installed the drivers again
now similar problems

First, when installing the supplied drivers they installed some sort of HDMI audio drivers for my graphics card. However i do not have w/e i need for this so i was forced to disable it in sound options and change the sound source to my sound blaster.
Secondly, for some reason, i can run games in windowed. I can run swbf2 and mass effect just fine in windowed mode but fullscreen i get many crashes.

i have seen many people having crashes with my HD3850 and there are several possible problems i found

1. Drivers, the ati drivers apparently suck
I have installed properly the supplied drivers and i have tried other drivers from the ati website
2. overheating
i suspect that the crashing may be related to overheating
however that does not explain why i can play mass effect on max settings windowed but not fullscreen, and why in some games like COD4 i get an almost instant crash without any time for the graphics card to overheat
3. directx or bios?i'm not really sure about this but i saw some threads were people updated their directx and bios, not sure for what, i think mobo and that seemed to help
4. Is this related to the HDMI audio problem?
5. Faulty Card?
I can play the games windowed just fine though so it seems odd
6. i have seen many fixed this problem on AGP by disabling fast write
however i have PCI-e and that's not an option
does that help?
7. i remember somewhere it was posted that someone fixed this by going into device manager and changing some settings on the pci bus

Note: now i am not sure if am getting a blue screen
i just made it crash and it stayed at a black screen for a while without going to blue

i suspect that possibly some driver or direct x or some software error is making my games get stuck in an infinite loop and overheat
however i don't know how GPU's work so that is just a guess
any suggestions on diagnosing my problem?

 

[JSanguancheu]

The most likely cause is not enough power from the power supply.

It's recommended by most video card manufacturers to have a 450w or greater PSU for the 3850.

Most Dell PCs come with a generic average quality 300-350w PSU.

 

[Lemonio]

oh also i forgot during my crashes i can't use ctrl alt delete
and also i often got bumped to really high or really low resolutions before or after crash

about power supply i doubt that's the problem
the graphics card is really the only part of my system using up power, and also if i run mass effect full blast windowed, (but 1024 by something resolution so it still fills up the whole screen) i do fine
i know some people with the same power supply and graphics card so i doubt power supple is the problem

ooooh right'
i forgot to say i got an antec tp true power trio 430 watts
i forgot it doesn't say that in the report

 

[Lemonio]

i have tested guild wars fullscreen and i opened the side of the case
after a little while i got vpu recover and after disabling vpu recover i got a blue screen crash saying something like this

error with ati2dvag

something about my graphics card

the device got stuck in an infinite loop

and the STOP code is
0x000000EA (0x89FOC480,0x89EC0368, 0xBA4E7CBC, 0x00000001)

i am guessing that if i was able to create a crash with my side panel opened it is most likely not overheating

 

[Lemonio]

also
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic15393.html
this thread describes a fix for the infinite loop
however i'm not sure how to do this because i have pci-e and i don't have a cpu to agp controller in my device manager

 

[JSanguancheu]

ok, Are you using the driver that came on the video cards CD or one from ATI?

I've noticed that sometimes video cards don't like the reference drivers from ATI or nVidia.

It's usually best to use the one on the CD or the latest version from the video card manufacturer.

 

[Lemonio]

i'm using the ati driver that came with the card

 

[Lemonio]

i'm also suspecting my problem could be with my mobo, perhaps out of date drivers, or maybe bad bios settings?

 

[Lemonio]

i have found another person with seemingly the same problem who said this

"
Eventually I did find out what was wrong and yes it was the motherboard, it was just old the agp port was knackered meaning changing the agp speed in bios was making it last a bit longer between every BSOD.

After messing around with it for a while the HDD went pop and the processor melted down, Infact the only thing that did suvive was the RAM. doh!"

 

[Lemonio]

i have also found that my card comes overclocked from the factory apparently...
and also apparently power play is disabled