Radeon 9800 Pro freezes

Hi everyone,

Recently I replaced my Asus GeForce4 TI 4400 with a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb card for the simple fact that my old card was giving me alot of BSoD's. Turns out the GPU fan had gone out, simple fix. Anyway, I was hoping to keep the Radeon and use the GeForce in a second computer.

However, after about 3-4 min of game play one of three things always happens. Either the video feed drops out all together and the monitor goes on standby, OR the game (as well as my system) locks up, OR the game drops out and I get returned to my desktop. Of the three, my system locks up the most. I have updated every driver I could possibly think of; MB Bios, Catalyst Drivers, nForce2 (Chipset) drivers, sound drivers, DirectX 9.0c, you name it.

Some of these problems were similar to the ones my GeForce was giving me before I finally stared getting BSoD's. I did notice that the GPU cooler that came on the Radeon looked rather cheesy. Could this be a heating issue, a MB incompatibility, or faulty Vid Card?

I've tried lowering the hardware acceleration, dropped the card from 8X to 4X, disabled Fast Write, disabled VPU recover, disabled Write combining and nothing works. If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it. I'm at my wits end with this thing. Oh...if it matters, the games I'm trying to play are Freelancer, Call of Duty, and StarWars Galaxies.

PLEASE HELP!!

 

To fix your problem you will have to do a clean installation of your Operating System, including a format of the drive.

Once loading all your motherboard drivers, graphics e.t.c Do Not load your motherboards AGP drivers, then your graphics card should work perfectly with 3D Applications.

I found this out after building 5 work machines with 9800Pro cards for AutoCad / 3D Design, I have yet to narrow down a specific cause or culprit however if you do not install your AGP chipset for your motherboard then you will not have any problems.

It's a problem with a mixture of things i believe, mainly BIOS & Chipset.

I would suggest looking to update your bios to the latest version, if you do not know how to do this or unsure, just provide your motherboard make and model and we'll help you out.

:good:

*Edit I would suggest noting your current bios version, then looking up on the manufacturers website for the latest version. Between the release of what your bios version is at the moment and the latest release, have alook at all the changes they have made, if there are any AGP updates in any of the versions of the Bios get the latest one and you should be fine. However if you have the same problem again, i would do what i suggested and not install the AGP driver. (do not just remove it or uninstall it - has to be a clean install with no trace of it)

And to note, a system with no AGP chipset loaded will obviously run your 9800Pro card, although it will run slightly slower, but not with a huge significance though.

 

Hmm...where to start? To answer Sniper's question, I made sure to completely uninstall the GeForce drivers by using a version of "Detonator Destroyer". After that failed to correct the problem, I did a clean install of WinXP SP2, no luck there either. I didn't test the card in another system but I did go back to where I bought it and exchanged it for a new one, still had the same problem.

ProcalX, I made sure that my bios on my MB were the latest version. Thinking that the problem was my MB I went ahead and replaced it today with an ABIT AN7 nForce2 w/GuRu microprocessor. Unfortunatley, the problem still persists.

Your suggestion about not loading the AGP drivers is most definitley very intriguing. If there's one thing that the new MB and the old one have in common is that they both utilize the nForce2 chipset which I assume would mean they use the same AGP chipset driver. I will do a clean install of windows tomorrow after work and skip the AGP driver this time. I sure hope it works, the only other thing I can think of that might cause these problems is possibly faulty memory.

Thanks alot to the both of you for your help. I'll be sure to let you guys know how it goes.

 

Well, i doubt my posted suggestion is a full proof answer, but in my experience it did work, if it comes to the worst scenario it's going to be the card itself.

But your suggestion of memory could be a logical explanation, however i stick with my previous posts thoughts as i had tried different memory.

Good Luck :good:

 

Finally! I got my system up and running with seemless game play. Of course it took me having to go thru 3 motherboards. Seems like that Abit AN7 w/GuRu chip MB I bought didn't get along with my 9800 pro, so I exchanged it for an ABIT NF7-S2G. After a quick Bios update and disabling "Fast Write" & "Write Combining" I'm back in action once again. I even installed all the nForce2 chipset drivers to include the "GART" driver and still no problems. Thanks again to everyone who responded with your ideas.

GAME ON!!!!!!!

 

See my thread down a bit "9800 pro overheating".

It turns out it wasn't overheating. It is the exact same problem as you have. I have replaced my psu and case thinking it was either a power or a heat problem. All i am left with really is my motherboard.

I am currently on a:

Gigabyte GA8S648FX-L Motherboard
2.53ghz P4


I am considering moving across to AMD. Can anybody find anything where people have had problems with this motherboard before. It's doing my head in this problem.