New Vid Card = Bluescreen blues

[Nevermore]

Greetings,

I've got an old system that has been running perfectly stable with an fx5200 (woo hoo!) for years. I finally ponied up to put a decent AGP video card in it so I could play games like Oblivion again. I bought a refurbished card from E-bay, and I think I got a dud, but it may not be the card.

Before installing the new x800pro I ran 3dmark01, 03, 05, and 06 on my fx5200 and it ran all four tests (didn't score too much, but it ran). With the new card, 3dmark03 bluescreens as soon as it loads the second graphics test. 3dmark01 bluescreens somewhere in the middle of the nature test each time. 3dmark05 and 06, however, run perfectly fine and give me a pretty nice score.

When it "bluescreens" there is no test on the screen, just a pure blue screen for 2-3 seconds and then the system reboots. Each time I get back into windows I get a "System has recovered from a serious error" message.

So, I'm at a loss. Also, I can play Morrowind for an hour with no problems. If I try to play Oblivion, though, it runs for 1 second to 1 minute before I get another bluescreen/reboot.

Here's what I've done:

-Tried different power connector and even unhooked extra hard drive, cd drive, fans, etc., from my PSU.

-Removed two PCI cards.

-uninstalled all drivers from ATI and Nvidia, re-installed ATI drivers only.

-tried older version of ATI drivers.

-run a memory test on the video card ram (it passed)

-Used ATI tool to stress out the GPU. The card gets up to 70C but it runs stable. I used this to log the GPU temp and when it is bluescreening it can be as low as 45C.

-I have not O/C'd the card, but tried underclocking it a bit, which didn't help.

-Disabled system reboot upon system error in WinXP. Now, I just get a blank blue screen that never disappears.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!


AMD Athlon XP 3000+
512MBx2 Mushkin DDR Dual-Channel RAM
Asus A7n8x-e Deluxe mobo
Sata 1.5m/b Seagate 300GB HDD
Dvd-rw drive
Antec True Power 480w PSU

 

[orihS ‪‪‪Shiro]

My 2 guesses.

#1 You bought a dud card.

#2 Your PSU can't supply enough power to the X800pro, so when you try to run an intensive game or your GPU gets strained the PSU craps out and the system doesn't get enough power, forcing a reboot.

Got any other PSUs laying around?
Also have you tried swapping the old card back in and checking for the same sort of reboots?

 

[Hefemeister]

You can also try running driver sweeper in safe made after uninstallation of drivers in case of anything lingering from old installs.

Guru3D - Driver Sweeper

 

[Nevermore]

I did try the old card, it works like a charm and gets through the same spot on 3dmark03 and 01 that crash the new card. I thought of the PSU idea and so I unhooked all pci devices and peripherals except one internal sata drive, and put the card on it's own power chain, but the bluescreen still occured at the EXACT same places.

Since I can re-create it so easily (3dmark03 - as SOON as the 2nd test tries to start), I would usually think it's a software/driver issue... except that the old card works fine and I've tried 3 different drivers for the new x800.... I will try driver sweeper, though.

 

[orihS ‪‪‪Shiro]

I did try the old card, it works like a charm and gets through the same spot on 3dmark03 and 01 that crash the new card. I thought of the PSU idea and so I unhooked all pci devices and peripherals except one internal sata drive, and put the card on it's own power chain, but the bluescreen still occured at the EXACT same places.

Since I can re-create it so easily (3dmark03 - as SOON as the 2nd test tries to start), I would usually think it's a software/driver issue... except that the old card works fine and I've tried 3 different drivers for the new x800.... I will try driver sweeper, though.

ATI is known to have some odd driver issues, and lack of overall support.
(Still waiting for them to figure out the ati2dvag.dll error.)
My guess is that's exactly what your problem could be, (not the ati2dvag.dll error) but lack of support/driver issues.

If I were you, I'd look for third party drivers for it.

 

[Nevermore]

I've now used Driver Sweeper to completely and utterly remove all nvidia and ati driver components, re-installed ATI. Still no luck. I've played with the BIOS settings for AGP Spread Spectrum, Aperture, AGP Fast Write, etc., and it helped slightly. Anyone have suggestions on what these should be set to, or suggestions on 3rd party drivers?