Hercules 9600xt Problem

Ruaidhri

Im having a problem with my new Hercules 9600xt. I'm using windows 2000, and just upgraded from a Geforce 2 GTS(I got the 9600xt Friday morning). So after uninstalling nvidia's drivers and installing the hercules drivers i started a game (Unreal 2 XMP) to see what it was like. My machine locked up after a minute of gameplay. although i still could hear game sounds. after about another minute, the ATI's VPU recovery software kicked in and told me it could not restore hardware mode, and i'll have to reboot to get hardware mode rendering back and dropped me back to the desktop. so after a few hours of trying to figure out what was wrong i formatted my hdd and reinstalled windows 2000. put service pack 4 on it, DirectX 9.0b, and the ATI catalyst 3.10 drivers on it.

So i reinstalled Unreal 2 XMP and tried again. this time it played for about 10 minutes before it locked up. complete crash. I lost keyboard control and the machine froze.

i've tried everything i can think of to stop the card doing this. i have a 400w PSU, Asus A7V8X Motherboard, 768MB PC2100 RAM (tested and working with DocMem)couple of hard drives. i tried flashing my board to the latest bios revision. i tried restoring the bios defaults. i have yet to try it in another machine, but i'm pretty sure it's a software issue.

Can any of you suggest anything the could be wrong? or at least to try.

Creamy Goodness

did u make sure to use driver cleaner to remove the old drivers?

it's not as simple as clicking uninstall in add/remove programs.

Ruaidhri

i formatted my hard drive that windows is installed on. before that i ran some tool to remove any traces of the nvidia driver ( which would be gotten rid of by a format...)

Col_Loki

Make sure your AGP size is set to 128mb (or whatever size it is) in the BIOS..... ive heard of crashing like that before and that was the problem.. worth a try.

unkel

What's the make / model of your PSU? Not a Qtec I hope. I take it you have not overclocked any of your hardware?

Ruaidhri

no unkel, i dont overclock anything in my pc
and yes it's a QTEC 400watt.

COL_LOKI: i'll do that now and tell ya how i got on.

thanks.

Creamy Goodness

Originally posted by Ruaidhri
no unkel, i dont overclock anything in my pc
and yes it's a QTEC 400watt.

COL_LOKI: i'll do that now and tell ya how i got on.

thanks.

can we have the rest of your system specs...?

that q-tec doesn't take to well to intel based systems esp. if your gfx card needs that extra ooommpph...

joePC

Maybe over heating are you getting any screen coruption, if not the more than likely the PSU (QTEC no wonder there so cheap????)

Thanks joePC

Ruaidhri

Board: Asus A7V8X
CPU: 2100XP @ 133/266
RAM : 256MB TwinMOS PC2100 @ PC2100. 512 MB TwinMOS PC2700 @ PC2100
GFX: Hercules 9600XT
On Board Audio : AC97 Codec ( ACL650 chipset )
1x WD Raptor on Promise FastTrack 376 Controller
2x IDE Drivers on IDE Channels
1x Iomega Zip Disk on IDE Channel
1x 400w QTEC PSU.


CPU Idles at 34C. Motherboard at 22C.
GFX never even gets warm .
i thought it might be overheating but i ruled that out ages ago

Col_Loki

You could download MBM5 (mother board monitor) this will tell you your voltages and temps etc.... watch your 12v and 5v rails before running Prime95 and while prime95 is running and see how she copes.

Then download Prime95 and run the torture test for a while, this will stress the CPU & memory and will put the PSU under pressure........ good way of seeing wheather it lies with the graphics card or not!!

Q-tec are pretty bad, if you find it is the PSU then you should prob invest in a new one... good makes are Antec, be-quiet, zalman, fortron, enermax...... they'd be the best (there is also PC power and cooling - there top of the range and cost a bomb.... would still go for one of the above anyway).

Ruaidhri

what kind of deviation am i looking for in the voltages?

Col_Loki

Run the tests and post up the results, if the PSU is that week then the Rails will be very low and very noticable.......... pop the results and we should be able to give you an indication of how bad the problem is.

Main rails to watch are 3.3v (vio) , +5v, +12v....... the - rails arent that important.

ARGINITE

it could just be a faulty gfx card so try the card in anohter machine
or that many windows 2000 configurations have problems with AGP configuration.

Civilian_Target

This only happen with UT2k3? You might find that when it installs itself it configs itself for nVidia machines. Reinstalling the game couldn't hurt. Don't forget to remove the config files after the uninstall.

Stephen

civ_target: He reinstalled the entire OS, so I don't see how reinstalling the game again will change things

Ruairi: does this happen with any other graphics-hungry games?

shinzon

I know its a long shot but are fast writes enabled in your bios if it is disable it and thatll sort ye

Shin

Ruaidhri

Stephen: it's lock up in a few seconds in Vice City. U2XMP Works the best on it,and also looks the best

Pulled the card out last night and put it in another almost identical machine (same MoBo). it ran games fine.no problems so the card is ok, it's a component in my machine.


shinzon: disabling it now i'll let ya know how i got on.

thanks for the help so far lads

Giblet

Try the Omega drivers based on Catalyst 3.1!

http://www.omegacorner.com/ati_2kxp.htm

Ruaidhri

Tried the drivers giblet but to no avail

the core of the problem seems to be the VPU recovery.something kicks it off (so the card is failing on something).

COL_LOKI i'm ran the prime95 app for 12 hours.it had no problems. i'm monitoring the voltage also. it never deviated by anything more than 5%. the most i've seen it is at about 3% deviation.
i also tried my old PSU (300w.it's not a qtec though). it could not supply enough current to it and my computer would just about boot with it. i really dont think it's the PSU.

I also tried a different sound card (form an onboard ACL650 chipset to an Aurel Votrex 8820 chipset) and another network card (Changed my Broadcom 5507 to a 3COM 905C-TX).

i'm still completly stumped.

Stephen

Try removing all components un-necessary to run the game and see if it still happens.

Stephen

Just did some googling there, someone on another forum with the same motherboard and graphics card as yourself solved a similar problem by disabling VPU recover altogether in the ATI control panel.

edit: some other sites say to try setting your bios to use 4x AGP instead of 8x.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Cr3m0
can we have the rest of your system specs...?

that q-tec doesn't take to well to intel based systems esp. if your gfx card needs that extra ooommpph...

Why intel systems?

Creamy Goodness

Originally posted by RicardoSmith
Why intel systems?

well i had one in my p4 3ghz geforce 4 1gig ram audigy2 abit ic7-g board and the powersupply would cut out half way through winxp install

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Cr3m0
well i had one in my p4 3ghz geforce 4 1gig ram audigy2 abit ic7-g board and the powersupply would cut out half way through winxp install

Based on your one experience you 100% certain that they have problems with all Intel systems. Bit of a leap that one. Besides it might have just been a faulty unit. It might even have been a poor AC supply in your house. Why buy lots of expensive and power hungry components then buy a budget PSU? PSU's failling and causing problems is a fairly rare occurance. But yet nearly everytime someone has a problem with hardware, everyone points at the PSU.

Ruaidhri

Originally posted by Stephen
Just did some googling there, someone on another forum with the same motherboard and graphics card as yourself solved a similar problem by disabling VPU recover altogether in the ATI control panel.

edit: some other sites say to try setting your bios to use 4x AGP instead of 8x.

IT WORKS!
Thanks munch. seems to be a problem with the drivers not detecting that the card was working in 4x (drivers thought it was 8x).