Sapphire Radeon 9500 Pro problem :(

Anima

Hi,

My friend recently got one of these from komplett. When he put it in and hooked the power cable up, he couldn't install the drivers.
It said he needed a default vga driver or something. Anyway he reinstalled windows and it installed perfectly but as soon as he runs 3d mark, half-life or any games, it restarts.

So he tried the other catalyst drivers (version 3. something i think)
and still restarts. Unless the power cable setup is done wrong i can't see what could be wrong. Could his motherboard have a glitch with this card? He has a MSI 645 Ultra C with celeron 1/8ghz, 256 ddr with win2k.

Any ideas?

TacT

install the card as a standard pci graphics adapter first, then install the cata's

Anima

zuh? It an agp card are you sure that will work?

Also theres 2 devices with it, the normal 9500 and then a 9500 secondary. Which is the actual card?

BKtje

To answer your second question.
the secondary is there for dual screen. (ie 2 monitors).
Its kinda like a virtual gfx card. The 'secondary' feature only comes into play if you plug in a second monitor.

Not sure if this is related, but a friend of mine had same problem with his geforce. he uninstalled his VGA driver . He fixed it by re-installing the mobo's drivers. (ie on a VIA board it would be the VIA 4in1's). I know without thr VIA4in1's(on VIA boards) games will crash etc which is similar to the problem your friend now has.
Make sure he installed all the drivers that came with his mobo etc.
Not sure if this is a similar problem.

I know its not much help but im sure a more knowledgeable person will answer :x

TacT

yes it will work.

It doesn't matter either way, all he should be doing is clicking have disk, browse, voila.

Tell him to get his motherboard manual out and have a read of it

right click my computer>advanced>startup and recovery, uncheck box to automatically reboot on errors. Then next time if it's going to happen hopefully you'll get a blue screenful of information which will tell you what's causing the problem

Anima

Ok tac sounds like a plan, i'll try that tommorrow.

SemperFi

ATI cards are particular about how they are installed.
try un-installing the video card in the ADD/REMOVE hardware. Then reboot and install standard vga card, then run install from the CD.

Anima

Well he got a technician friend of his dad to come round and try and install it properly but couldn't do it. He had the latest mobo drivers (agp & ide) and even tried upgrading the bios (couldn't do it btw). Your man suggested that he install 98 and see but i don't think this would do much.

So far the card has been installed correctly but games or 3d mark won't work and the comp just restarts. I didn't get a chance to do what you said tac with the turning off restart on failure. I'll try it the next day. Anybody got any other suggestions?

SemperFi

send the card back and get a new one.

Anima

It worked fine in another computer.

Myg

Ive seen this problem with a geforce 3, there were conflicts with resources between it and the mobo, it only worked after i installed older drivers, and then installed the newer ones over it. But that is Nvidia, no idea with ATi.

Rambo

Does the computer just give a black screen when you try run a game. and then you have to restart..

have you tried testing directx make sure you have directx 8.1 installed. and test the directx display is working under direct 3d
if you do get a black screen..

try downloading the lastest driver from www.ati.com
I had this problem with nearly all the ati cards 7500 up I have got..

Kevok

Just wondering about that card actually and rather than make another thread, i thought i'd ask here.

What outputs does this card have? And if it only has DVI and not VGA, does it come with an adapter?

Anima

He has dx8.1 installed and the newest drivers.

The card has a vga and dvi connectors and an adapter for dual monitor.

Rambo

I have also found sometimes the ATI card sends out the wrong refresh rate to the monitor. in 3d mode try changing the monitor refresh rate to 60hz instead of 85hz what ATI set it to.

I have the Sapphire Radeon 9000 and I had to make these changes in order to get it work onder 3d