poor performance with Radeon 9800pro

[simon_j]

The previous card was a GF FX 5200, but I wiped the drive and reinstalled WinXP before I installed the 9800, so that should not be the cause.

Also, I've installed all new drivers, flashed the BIOS, added additional fans (2 in, 2 out), added additional heatsinks to the card, and spent an entire week un/reinstalling various Catalyst versions using the uninstall utility. :snip:

I've even disabled ACPI so I could change the IRQ settings, only to find that my MOBO still would not let me change the values manually, so I pulled out all PCI cards (lan, phone modem.) Still, it crashes with the new drivers.

[maximus7001]

I wiped the drive and reinstalled WinXP before I installed the 9800

So let me get this straight, was the nvidia in the machine during the reinstall of xp?
If so, the purpose of reinstalling for the new card was defeated.

[simon_j]

No no no...the radeon was plugged in by then, just without the drivers installed obviously so it's running like any ol' onboard graphics. =)

[maximus7001]

You mentioned adding heatsinks to the card. Is this when the problems started? Is the fan still turning?

Example.....I had a customer call me last week with similar crashing and wierd gfx stuff(saphire r9000pro,3 weeks old). Turned out the gpu hsf had stopped spinning. After oiling it, all is good again.

What exact brand and model is the card? Post a link from where you got it.

[simon_j]

I added the heat sinks after the crashes began, thinking it might have been heat-related. But I've also gotten crashes only minutes after booting up, and the heatsinks didn't improve the performance at all.

The heatsinks actually came with a fan, but I didn't install that since the fan on the card is working fine.

The card is a retail ATI (with the gargoyle on the box), purchased from tigerdirect.com. The problems surfaced about 5 weeks into use, which is past their return/exchange limit of 30 days.

[maximus7001]

Maybe it's not the gfx card that is causing the crashing. It actually sounds like a ram problem. Check your ram with goldmemory or memtest86.
Actually do it, don't just brush it off as speculation. Most of the time it is the ram that does stuff like this.
goldmemory
memtest86

[simon_j]

I've run memtest, let it loop the test 8 times, but it did not find any errors. Is there anything else I should be looking for besides errors?

Thanks for the heads up on this program. Are there similar utilities that check the mobo, cpu, etc.? Might as well check them all out...