Radeon 9800!!!

[shinchi]

Hey!
I've been trying to sort out my Radeon 9800 for some time now, its an 'HIS IceQ Excalibur 9800Pro 128mb' every 5-10minutes the screen will totally currupt itself, this happens at totally random intervals.

Heres a pic of what happens to my screen!
After following earlier advice I tried placing a large fan on the side with no luck, I'm using a 350w PSU, so not sure if it's that!
I've also returned the card twice and the problem remains exactly the same!
I'm using the latest drivers, and the latest directX on a clean install of XP!

So does anyone know what the problem is as I've been trying to work it out for a while now!!!!!????????

 

[WarC]

What are your system specs?

Motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc etc...Has this been occuring since you bought it, or is it new?

 

[shinchi]

It's been going on pretty much since I got the card, it has it's good days and it's bad ones! So it's pretty inconsitant!
Specs Are:-

1Ghz Athlon
Awrdacpi Motherboard (Not sure what type, as I bought the system 2nd hand - I'm Pretty sure its an SIS Motherboard!)
512mb System Ram (2x 256chips)
I've tried taken out all excess cards like sound card, DVD Rom, Zip Drive to see if the extra power would help at all! But to no change!

 

[shinchi]

Just found out its a K7SEM Motherboard!!!

And also the picture it case it doesn't show up is at this link:-
http://www14.brinkster.com/witnesstochange/Pic.html

Thanks

 

[WarC]

What speed AGP are you running at? If the board is urnning at 8x, try setting it to 4x...The speed difference isn't noticeable in most if not all current games. A lot of motherboards that are capable of supporting 8x run a lot more stable at 4x.

Most if not all Radeon 9800's require a small floppy-type molex connector (not sure what its technical name is!), and its usually a good idea that it is on its own power "rail". Make sure this is connected.

What brand power supply are you using? 350w is just barely sufficient these days for gaming machines, but if your using a supply of poor quality, this can cause instability and other problems.

If you haven't tried this already...Download the latest drivers for both your video card and motherboard chipset, as well as DirectX (it's at 9c now). Then, uninstall your video card drivers and restart. Log back in, and install the chipset drivers first. Then install the new video card drivers and finally DirectX. Make sure you uninstall the previous drivers before installing the new ones, this has been known to cause problems with ATI video cards.

Good luck! Hopefully we can get that card back to what it does best: crunching games!

 

[Triple6]

The ECS K7SEM is a total piece of crap. Check to see that you have the latest BIOS update for the board - ECS boards need them.


Powersupply problems are another issue - quality does matter.

 

[shinchi]

yeh I know my motherboard is a piece of crap!
but my financial status at the moment means no upgrades! -Damn!

To be honest Im not really sure how to Flash a new bios as I've always thought it wasn't worth taking the risk!!!

 

[cheese]

My ECS K7SEM with my old duron lasted me 3 years no problems, no BIOS updates. (Guess i was lucky)

 

[safegezaaa]

A couple of months ago, my PC started doing the same thing. Windows would reboot, video would be corrupt in both windows and in DOS (I saw the same kind of thing as in the picture link you provided). it was a very random problem. Sometimes my system would be fine for a couple of days and then I would have this problem happen every few minutes. I was 99.9% sure that my 9700 Pro AIW was to blame so I RMA'd it back to ATI who simply gave me a new 9700.

I needed to re-install Windows so I chose to do it when installing the new card and start 'fresh'. Well, the problem wasn't nearly as bad but it still happened occasionally. I was using an A-bit IC7 and I have never liked this board. I have Corsair XMS PC3200 (400Mhz) matched memory (2 x 512Mb) and in order to get the memory to work in my board, I had to slow the timings down. I didn't buy fast, expensive RAM to have to slow it down so, I decided that it was time for a new motherboard so I bought a new Asus P4C800-Deluxe. I re-installed Windows, installed updated drivers for everything (chipset, video, directx, etc) and thought my problems had been resolved.

Yesterday (about 4 days after my new board was installed), I got the weird video thing twice - each time I had to hard-boot my PC. This thing is driving me crazy. I have run memtest and my RAM checks out ok. The motherboard and video card are both brand new. In fact the only thing that is the same is my memory, power supply (Antec true power 410W), Soundblaster Live Platinum (On-board sound has been disabled), and optical drives (Lite-on 48x Burner and an Optowrite 4x DVD burner). Oh, I have a Sony floppy drive attached too.

I'm running out of ideas (and money to replace things) - Does anybody have any ideas on what could be causing this?

Thanks!

 

[Rollin' Rog]

I've seen this happen on my system occasionally -- always due to a power glitch.

You might want to look into power supply issues and also test the ram and run chkdsk on the hard drive to see if there are any file system problems.

But my bet is it's a power supply/line filtering or "brown out" issue affecting the system's voltage and corrupting the memory.

MS has a good ram tester for you here, I'd run it as well, you can try the thorough test and let it run overnite:

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp