x800 Pro Issues

F

Fiste

n00b
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
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24
Got my Visiontek x800 Pro card last Friday and I'm seeing a bit of weirdness.

Just for starters, I'm running XP Pro, fresh install done this weekend. Using the stock ATI 4.5 Catalyst drivers (not the ones on the Visiontek site). Nothing in the PC is overclocked at this point.

3DMark2003 just randomly crashes to the desktop in between tests. No error messages, etc. Just dies. Seems to be random on which test it crashes out of. It's never made it through the test. Games seem to play fine.

Overclocking

When I move from the default clock settings using Powerstrip, I get weird artifacting/corruption happening on screen. (Dell 2001FP) I'm not clocking anything high at all, just bumping it up from the default. Corruption won't go away until I reboot.

Any thoughts?
 
What kind of system do you have? AMD, Intel? What motherboard? What chipset are you using?
 
Here's my specs:

MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
3.2 GHz P4
1 GB RAM

420 Watt Vantec Power Supply

2 36GB Raptors in Raid 0
3 other hard drives
Samsung CD/RW
Sony DVD Writer
Audigy2 ZS
 
5 hard drives including 2 raptors ...2 burners....sheesh u got quite a rig there. that 420 watt vantec might not be enough with that setup.~! ....might need to invest in a 550 watt antec or something similar. :eek:
 
Threw in a ThermalTake 550W I had sitting around and I'm still getting the 3DMark2003 crash to the desktop. it's always immediately after a test completes.
 
Since I installed my Audigy 2 my 3D Mark 2003 crashes with a texture error about half way though or closer to the end or something like that.

Personally I hate 3D Mark 03. The damn thing has given me more problems with instability even when my system is perfectly stable doing ANYTHING else. Like playing UT2004 for hours.
 
You're gonna have to simplify. Remove as much hardware as possible including your soundcard and try 3dmark again.
 
If you can, try juicing the settings little by little to see where the corruption comes into play. There may be a breaking point where things become unstable because of heat issues or something.
 
You may want to pry off the heatsink and apply some AS5 in place of the silly putty they put under there these days. A lot of people have complained that the quality of said substance and the consistency of its application by the card manufacturer are questionable.

You may just have a sloppy paste job under that pretty fan assembly.
 
Powerstrip has an issue with X800s. When changing from default speeds, desktop artifacting is immediately apparent. Try AtiTool instead; it works well for me. ATI Tool

Let us know what kind of overclock you get. Mine is pretty low, 519/565 stable in everything but FarCry. 500/500 for FarCry. :(

Very nice card though. I'm not complaining.

kneht
 
I'll give that a try when I get home tonight. Are the 'Find Max Core' and 'Find Max Mem' autodetections reliable? Or are you better off just tweeking it yourself?
 
The Find Max core & mem seemed to work well. They take time. You may want to adjust the settings for longer warm up times, etc. ATI Tool's forums seemed like a good source of information on tweaking it. (I am new to ATI cards & ATI Tool.) Some suggested on running find max overnight. It locked the computer up too much for me to do that.

You may find that what is stable one time is not stable later. This might be due to heat, not just of your GPU but the DDR3 ram on board. Mine gets very hot at stock speeds. I am afraid to touch them overclocked. I think maybe some of the best overclockers are using water blocks to cool both ram and GPU. I am using stock cooling with no plans to change. My GPU will get up to 75 C when playing FarCry. Other games are usually in the high 60s.

I think that using the Find Max function to get an idea of how high your card can go is a good start. After that, tweak by hand, playing games to ensure stability.

kneht
 
Reading this forum and seeing that your having the same problems here with a 9800 Pro and a lot less stuff plugged in makes me think its that Vantec PSU. I had a minimal amount of things plugged into it and I still received video corruption and what I also think may have borked my NF2 and Mobile 2400+, hmmm. I might have to give Vantec a call.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
Since I installed my Audigy 2 my 3D Mark 2003 crashes with a texture error about half way though or closer to the end or something like that.

Personally I hate 3D Mark 03. The damn thing has given me more problems with instability even when my system is perfectly stable doing ANYTHING else. Like playing UT2004 for hours.
Click to expand...

I get the EXACT same issue since installing and Audigy 2 along with an X800......every game I throw at it and prime95, etc runs no prob though....... 3dmark03 is junk.

Kared
 
DONT USE POWERSTRIP UNLES YOU WANT A DEAD CARD... sorry... i ruined my share of cards using that POS program...

grab rage 3d tweak... it works alot better..
 
I think you may also want to rethink your Power Supply. Just because it says 550 Watt doesn't mean it is any better than the Vantec 420 power supply.

You need close to 25A coming from your 12V rail with everything you have in your box.

You need something like a PC Power and Cooling 510 Deluxe, Antec 550 Power Supply with the adjustable rails, or the new OCZ 520 Power Supply with sustained 520 watt and adjustable rails.

(See review in this months CPU Mag on the OCZ power supply, it also looks great)

Good Luck
 
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