Mysterious Instability?

M

morfinx

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 18, 2005
Messages
1,105
Hello fellow [H]Fers,

I recently purchased an ATI X850 Pro AGP off of ebay, installed a Zalman VF700 on it and threw it in the case. Unfortunately this one could not be unlocked to 16 pipelines, so I just did some overclocking on it, and load temperatures were good. However when I loop 3DMark, it would eventually lock up. By this I mean the screen goes black (and on rare occasions it was filled with artifacst). I tried to following:

1) Lowering AGP speed from 8X to 4X. From what I've seen, this does not lower the performance any. My last card (9600XT) had major stability issues running at 8X, but was stable at 4X.
2) Lowering clock speed back down to the Stock 500/500 on the X850
3) Disabled ATI Hotkey Poller and ATI Smart services
4) Checked voltage in SpeedFan, 12V rail shows 11.04V, yikes! Knowing that software voltage readings are often grossly inaccurate, I took out my DMM and measured directly from a molex connector. 12V rail goes between 12.02 to 11.94V idle/load, and 5V rail is 5.12V/5.13V idle/load. Both are well within the +/-5% limit.
5) I checked the temperatures before and after overclocking to see if it's temperature related. Before idle/load is 38C/58C, after is 39C/60C. Which I believe is actually cooler than stock speeds w/ stock cooling.

It still does the same thing. The CPU is stable for sure (Primed over 24 hrs), I've been running it at this speed for over a year. No problem w/ RAM either, Memtest over 24 hrs stable, same with Prime95 blended test. I've installed the latest Omega drivers. There are two BIOS update available for my mobo, however one enables dual-core support, the other enables E6 stepping, so I did not install either. My PSU is an Enlight 420W which has served me well for the last few years. The rest of my rig is in my sig.

I am quickly running out of ideas. I would like to have it running stable when Oblivion comes out. Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated! :)
 
Someone has suggested that it's the PSU, anyone else have any suggestions before I pluck down the money for a new one?
 
the card being agp, do you have another rig you can test it in, since you only had problems after putting it in.

best bet its the psu.
 
amd ati FO SHO said:
the card being agp, do you have another rig you can test it in, since you only had problems after putting it in.

best bet its the psu.
Click to expand...

Any rationale behind the PSU theory?

I unfortunately do not have another rig to test it in.
 
cyks said:
WTF did you just call me? lol jk
Click to expand...

lol why, do you have beef with that?

How is the Enermax PSU? I've always heard good things about them, might look into them if my problem turned out to be PSU related.

I'm not certain it is the PSU though, after all, my prelminary voltage testings seemed positive...
 
maybe you messed up the vid bios when you were flashing it? how many watts is the psu that you have now?
 
Sniper X said:
maybe you messed up the vid bios when you were flashing it? how many watts is the psu that you have now?
Click to expand...

I never flashed it, I looked at the fuse info in ATI Tools, and the ones I had aren't the unlockable ones. My PSU is 420W.
 
420 watts is enough to power that card. Did you test it with the stock heatsink? Maybe you got thermal paste on some electrical circuts when you were installing the cooler.
 
Hey guys, just want to give an update. I downloaded the latest VIA Hyperion chipset/AGP drivers, and it's MUCH more stable now. In fact I was able to play FEAR for about an hour with no problem. I am doing some more stability testing now.
 
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