Radeon x1950 pro and fatal crashes

[PhilST]

Hi one and all

I'm utterly confused - I have a system with a sapphire radeon x1950 pro which has a habit of crashing spectaculary out of 3D games. I can hear the gpu fan spinning up to maximum speed and then bump, monitor black screens, system becomes unresponsive, only solution is to cut power and reboot.

Certain games (e.g Oblivion, the new tomb raider) seem perfectly stable at maximum settings. Need for speed underground tends to crash out when you are designing a car. GTA San andreas runs fine until you go swimming - at 800x600 the game crashes out after 40 seconds in the water, at 1280x1024 it crashes out after around 10 seconds.

See why im getting confused??

My system is Win XP pro, core 2 duo e6400, 2gig ram, the radeon, p5b motherboard, and plenty of hard drive space. I have tryed checking the cards seating, reinstalling windows, updating to the latest drivers, and 3D mark 06, all to no avail. The gpu is not overclocked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

 

[eyeCpc]

The latest catalyst for that model card is a big mistake. When the ATI Catalyst 7.9 came with a newer MSI HD 2600XT both XP and Vista suffered tremenduosly even at the desktop.

The 7.10 that followed cleaned up everything for the new card in Vista while XP still sees the Start taskbar partially washed out. Go back to something like Catalsyt 7.2 but not older then the 6.5 for that model card used there.

Besides video drivers try disabling any firewall or antivirus programs as well as shutting down the Catalyst control center to see how things go then.

 

[PhilST]

Hi eye

I've tryed all this today to no avail, but a big thank you anyway!

Interestingly, instead of total unresponsiveness, im now getting a reboot to windows after the error, complete with serious error message;

Error signature
BCCode : 100000ea BCP1 : 88E633C0 BCP2 : 89118958 BCP3 : BA4E7CBC
BCP4 : 00000001 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

Also, a couple of times i've had 1 long beep followed by 3 short on the reboot; googled my motherboard codes (AMI board) and this means a memory error. For some reason though the system wont boot up off of only one ram stick.

So i'm still in the strange world where full on, heavily modded Oblivion runs sweetly, and the relatively simple San Andreas "dies in the water". Is this a hardware prob or a software prob???

Cheers!!

 

[eyeCpc]

One long and two short would usually mean a bad video card. Besides possible memory faults being seen there pointing at a hardware issue software drivers themselves trying to access system reserved memory addresses will cause a conflict with Windows.

The memory minidump file sometimes can help point out a specific problem. A board doesn't beep for software issues however.