Real Quick Question...

[idunnoe]

When i'm playing games on my computer i keep getting a 'vpu recovery' error message from my graphics card (ati 9600) about every 30 minutes, and it takes a while to start working again. Is this particular card supposed to do this?

I have the latest drivers for it and my case temps never go above 40 or 50C.

on a side note, my system overall is running quite sluggishly, i'm thinking it might be a bad VPU or RAM (is there any way i could test either of these?)

Don't know it there is a problem (if it is any ideas on how i could fix it?) or if its supposed to happen...

AMD 64 2800+
MSI K8n Platinum
512k Geil ddr400
Sapphire Radeon 9600
Windows XP

 

[jono199]

Its not a bad VPU, they just die on you. Reinstall the drivers or get the newest ones. Then try again. Nice RAM btw.

 

[jaksback]

its not necessarily your case temps that are skyrocketing, its when you are playing a game and that little gpu gets smoking hot and you may not even realize it. question is here: do you have your card oc'd?

 

[jono199]

I used to get the same problem, but with a 9800PRO, I tried new drivers and they worked, the heat sinks on the Sapphire 9600 are pretty good (Gfs PC uses one of those), but i agree with jaksback in that it could be overheating, it just doesn't sound like it to me.

Is this case temp 50C ambient? If it is thats way too high, my CPU only goes upto 66 at full load. And my Gfs GPU only went upto 80 when i made it work very hard. So an ambient of 50C would be massive.

 

[idunnoe]

actually the entire setup is just 3 months old and i reinstalled the newest drivers just last week so unless its just bad, i don't know...

Nothing in my computer is OC'd and my ambient temps are usually about 28-33C, but after a while of gaming it gets a little warm but never too hot. (i have like 9 case fans going...)

any suggestions of what it might be?

Also if it helps, often times when i close a game, i get a bsod with a stop error message saying something about a memory dump...

(its a relativley fresh install of XP too and i also use adaware so probably not spyware or even a virus for that matter)

[EDIT]
I just got another VPU error message...
this one says:
"VPU Recover has reset your grephics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands"

 

[GeckoEcho421]

VPU Recovers basically saves your gpu from completely screwing itself over from too much heat. When it reaches a certain point it terminates some stuff and underclocked the video card.

 

[Nubius]

I've only noticed this error on ATI Cards...since I'm an nvidia person myself and have never owned an ATI Card I'd like to know the answer to your question as well for my own curiosity and future reference....

The VPU is supposed to restart once it stops rendering the instructions it's being sent...but I don't know more than that or if that info is even correct =/

 

[GeckoEcho421]

That's cause nVidia doesn't have that.

 

[Nubius]

yeah I know they don't have the VPU Recovery feature...but still...what's the point of this 'feature' if all it does is cause your games to crash and give you an error and never work?

 

[jono199]

It stops your GPU from splattering all over the inside of your case