Hi all, I decided to upgrade my system as it was sterting to show signs of age (crashed a few times in games as well), and now i'm in trouble. I have athlon 2800+, radeon 9700pro, 360 w power supply, 1gb pc2700 etc....). After reading many articles on components, graphics cards, overclocking etc, I decided the way to go was a new graphics card, more cooling and maybe a slight overclock. Ordered a x800xt PE, bought a thermaltake heatsink, fan and duct and went to work. First thing that I noticed was motherboard monitor measured my standard fan wasn't doing its job at all (it had been getting more noisey)- 60c plus! at idle....guessing that this was causing the crashes. I replaced it with new cooling setup, now much better low 40's and about 10c higher under load. Now the trouble starts......... I couldn't get my fsb up any higher when i played with it, probably as my memory is not very good quality, so stuck with 166/33 as system would not boot at any other settings. So the only way to go was add to multiplier and then iron out hangs with a little more voltage. With board Volts in auto (on standard multiplier) was getting 1.71 core, I have upped it to 1.75. System seems stable enough. 2.25 ghz. temp 46/7c idle and 10c or so more at load. added new graphics card and latest catalyst drivers, seems really good and I'm feeling good......... Played a few games, seem ok- call of duty runs very smooth for many many hours and still does. When I tried HL2 though and system crashes after a while - horrible noise, black screen then reboot. same for doom 3. The same in 3dmark03 runs first demo fine and crashes in second. I have removed the overclock, and tried with the original settings and its still doing the same????? Ive tried everything I can think of now, played with graphics card setting for days, tried different drivers for it and can't get it to improve at all. Its driving me mad..................and I wish I hadn't started ! Have I damaged something?? -could it be the CPU? Maybe the heatsink is not installed properly? Its crossed my mind that my power supply may be the weak link as the system resets almost instantly-like a power surge/dip. Ive tried unpugging my 2nd HD, and cd drive-no difference....its just above recommended 350w for the x800xt pe. I'm thinking of going out and replacing the lot, but you guys seem to know your stuff so I thought Id ask you first. Is this normal when trying to overclock???? If so I take my hat off to you guys. Please Help me!...................
Sorry guys- should have said my Mobo is an ASUS A7V8X, running the same bios as when I got it- Could it be this????
You need to find the source of the problem - use memtest to test memory stability, prime95 high fft torture for cpu stability, 3dmark loops for gpu stability. Did you COMPLETELY uninstall the ati drivers before putting in the new card? does the same problem happen if you run the cpu at stock and use the 9700 pro?
Ok- Will download the tests, I did uninstall the previous hardware/drivers but didn't do a clean- which maybe ill try next, and it does still happen with the 9700pro. It all started since adding the bigger thermaltake fan/heatsink if thats any help at all. Interestingly though- I just swapped around the power connections so that the gfx card is now direct from power supply and it got alot further through 3dmark03- to the third test- which it has never done before. Could this be pointing to my PSU is not man enough???????????? many thanks
it depends on what kind of psu you have, if its a generic one or a qtec (or euivalent) chances are its that casuing some problems. a friend of mine had a generic x800pro @ xt speeds and his psu couldnt hack it. got a decent power supply and the problems went away.
psu update I have since tried a 500w power supply- which should be more than man enough for the job, and got the same results. I have also cleaned the drivers from windows and reinstalled them.... to no avail So looks like thats ruled out. This is driving me mad.........................
Like Jumper said, run all the seperate tests. Also, I would back up all your important files to that second hard drive, and do a complete reinstall of Windows. Then: update to Service Pack 2, install drivers in the right order, install DirectX 9c, and then install 3dmark03. See if it doesn't work. If you don't want to bother with an OS reinstall right away, download this driver cleaner, and clean off all ATi and chipset drivers. Uninstall DirectX 9c through Add/Remove Programs. Reboot, then reinstall the chipset drivers. Reboot twice, and install the latest Catalyst's (5.1's I believe). Reboot twice again, and install DirectX 9c. If THAT doesn't work, then I would say reformat... Also, run a spyware cleaner, or three .
