constant crashes (radeon 9700 pro cat3.9)

Hi every one

I need some help, i ahve a number of games that are crashing at random times. at first i had the cat 3.7's which caused these crashes also. What happens is the monitor goes into standy and any audio just freezes and thats how it stays until i reset the system.

HELP ME!!! its driving my nuts.

hers a list of some of the games it does it in:
NFS: underground
Desert Combat
Dues Ex 2 Demo
and a few others

is this damaing my hardware?? its not over heating the card.

Thanks Jason

ASUS A7V8X
Athlon 2000+
256 DDR (was 512 but one 256 died)
Audigy 2
2x SATA seagate 120GB

I have the same problem man, except the 3.7s worked fine for me...

I have roughly the same hardware as you too...

A7N8X DLX
Athlon XP 2700+
1024MB DDR RAM (Corsair XMS3200)

The crashes only occur in OpenGL mode for me...usually in Quake III Arena. VPU recovery usually restarts my Video Card...

[r3claim3r]

A Radeon 9700 Pro and a KT400 motherboard are rumored to not get along well with each other. Has this been going on constantly, or is this a new issue?

im on the NForce board dude...

:|

so far the crsahes have olny been a recent thing (mainly since i happened to install the 3.8's) since then nothing has gone well 3.7's caused the crashes when i went back to them (used catalyst uninstaller) and using the 3.9's.

Anyone know for sure if the radeons dislike the kt400 boards?

Planning a full system format soon to see if that may help.

Cheers
Jason

I got that too...cant go back to 3.7s because they now cause crashes...even after a fresh install of windows...

I think ive managed to tame the crashes somewhat tho...

Ive installed the hotfix drivers from ATI and disabled VPU monitor...I managed to get a Quake III bot match containing 20 bots to run for an hour...I quit on the 60th minute, because I reckon its rock solid again...

I think whats happened is, the newer drivers have changed something low level (i.e. changed something in the Video BIOS on the video card, possibly to enable VPU recovery) which means the instability caused by this will happen regardless of driver...

The reason VPU recovery causes crashes, afaik, is because it tries to set your display refresh rate to what it thinks is the best refresh rate for your system...meaning, if you force refresh rates VPU recovery wont have any of it

I really doubt your problem is to do with your chipset...chipset problems are very rare these days, and are usually a cop out for people that cant think of a practical solution

For example...I used to have the VIA 686b which was notoriously bad with the SBLIVE! or was it? I never experienced a problem with it, ever, it turned out that the majority of those with problems were those that installed chipset drivers to benchmark, and then tried to rollback to their old driver...

If you've tried the hotfix and disabled VPU Recovery, then I recommend you try to run a game using Windows default chipset drivers for your mobo...yes it will suck in performance, but if you get no stability issues you know its not a hardware problem, its a software problem...to do this, you'll need to do a clean install of windows...

Failing that, check the temperature of your north and southbridge on your motherboard...could be that you have a similar problem to the A7N8X boards rev 1.6 or lower, with the dodgy heatsinks, they have concave bases which meant the contact between the sinks and the chips wasnt there, causing the chips to overheat...a solution to these dodgy heatsinks was to shim them, or to put it simple, get some thermal pads and fill in the gaps...

Failing that,

*takes deep breath and cracks knuckles*

Check the fan on your GPU...it may need some crap removing from it, my fans constantly jam up with ****e, no matter how clean I keep my desk! PCs r crap magnets!

wasnt the vid card, it was the eax 4 sound card drivers causing the problem

Cheers j
Jason