Instability & BSOD

[egale]

Recently I replaced my NVidia TI4600 with an ATI 9800 PRO. I now have some problems which I can only attribute to the 9800 PRO. Once in a while now, I get a BSOD. Today I got one trying to wake up my system from standby. Last night, there was nothing running and this morning when I woke up the system, there was a BSOD staring me in the face.

Microsoft's analysis stated only that it was caused by a device driver which they could not determine.

I have a P4C800-e with 1gig, p4 3.0, xp pro. Has anyone encountered this or seen a solution?

 

[Matthias99]

Did you actually remove the NVIDIA drivers fully (with something like Driver Cleaner 2), or did you just throw the 9800Pro in there? NVIDIA apparently doesn't fully remove their drivers even if you manually uninstall them through Add/Remove Programs.

 

[egale]

I did driver cleaner 2.

 

[Matthias99]

Huh. I did the same upgrade a few weeks ago without a hitch. If you're getting random crashes all the time (not just while using the video card for more than 2D), you may have a hardware problem.

Do you have anything overclocked? If so, return to normal settings and try again.

What kind of power supply do you have? And is the 9800Pro on its own lead, or sharing one with some other devices? A cheap power supply might not be able to feed everything enough juice at once.

 

[egale]

The power supply is an Enermax 460 watt. I am not sure if the card is on its own lead but will check that out. The system was stable with the NVidia card so my guess it is ATI related. The BSOD today happened while waking it up not during a period of stress. I am running the cat 3.10s but started with the 3.9s.

I am also overclocking a bit, nothing extreme but will try again with the machine and video card not overclocked at all. Might also try uninstalling, doing a driver cleaner, and reinstalling.

It doesn't happen often nor is it consistant so it is hard to see if I really fixed it. Looking around a bit, I found that VPU recovery and fastwrites sometimes cause instability so I will look into that further as well.

 

[kevinpray]

Hi,

I had almost the exact same problem with my ATI 9700 Pro. I had an Antec 450W PSU, but it was only providing 3.09v on the 3.3 rail. This is what I did to resolve the problem:

1. Loaded latest catalyst drivers, turned off FastWrites
2. Upped AGP voltage by 0.05v (smallest increment possible with mobo)
3. Put the ATI molex connector on its own wire

and the most important:

4. Replaced the PSU with an Enermax 550. I probably could have gotten a lower wattage, but the really critical item is checking the amperage on the 3.3 rail. You need that as large as possible.

I have not had a problem for over 11 months now (since I made the changes). My 3.3 is rock steady, and so is my rig.

Kevin

 

[InlineFive]

Enermax is a decent brand but if you want something really high quality get something like an Antec. Mine is very high quality and maintains voltage levels very well.

-Por

 

[Keysplayr]

He has a 460W Enermax. That's palunty o' power. ATI says that a minimum of 300 is required for the R3xx cores with external power connector. I would agree to have the voltage rails tested. Would also recommend disconnecting your current hard drive and throw in another spare drive as the primary drive and install a new copy of window whatever. Install nothing but the OS and service packs, then install your video drivers before installing any other device driver (e.g. sound card, NIC, etc.) and test out the system. If it is stable, install other device drivers one at a time, reboot and test. Do not do more than 2 things at any given time otherwise you wont really know which one causes the problem. Process of elimination. There are a dozen other ways to go about testing your system, this is just one suggestion.

Keys

 

[Mem]

Don`t overlook ram going faulty,I had a similar thing happen to me and I thought it was my ATI drivers(since I installed new ATi drivers at the same time,bad timing ),turned out to be a bad stick of ram.

Install and run Memtest86 from here .

Also if ram timings are too aggressive in BIOS that too can cause instability problems.