Another gfx card problem thread

[Blackstuff]

In a moment of madness I decided that my knowledge of computers was sufficient (I built my current system) to perform a gfx card upgrade on my mates pc. Needless to say its all gone pear-shaped and I'm in dire need of some advice.

The pc is a Dell Dimension 4500 (2.26GHz, 512MB RAM, Windows XP Home) which had some old 16MB gfx card (Ultra 128?) in the AGP slot.

The new card is a Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB card bought OEM from overclockers. After uninstalling the old card and battling with the useless poxy manual that came with the new one, I eventually got the thing up and running, including ATI catalyst driver set from Windows update webbie. All seemed fine for a while and it ran the intro for Rome Total War fine (this stupid game is why he wanted/required the upgrade). However, things went rapidly down hill - gfx went screwey in game, progressed to thin vertical bands on all applications and ended up at the point where his display now freezes on the desktop right after booting up.

I got him to run a dxdiag before the machine became totally unuseable and it ran all the tests fine. He also has directx 9.0c installed.

Short of rechecking the BIOS settings and uninstalling/reinstalling the thing with an older driver set I'm stumped. Is there anyway to check if its a wonky card short of taking it out and plugging it into my own machine (really do not want to try that)?

Anywho, I'm supposed to be going down tonight to 'sort it' so any ideas would be gratefully received.

 

[Hawkwind]

Had a similar experience on my 'second' main PC. For some reason the card did not want to run at the lower AGP x 2 which is all the Mobo was capable of. Tried the card in my main comp and it worked fine. Have new Mobo/Processor/Ram on order

 

[Ballard]

There are whole web sites devoted to fixing problems like yours with 9700/9800 cards. Do a lot of searching on the web and you should be able to find something. In short there are a lot of factors that could cause those symptoms. Some of the possible things you can do are;

When making these changes do one at a time so you can see what has fixed the problem.

- Since you have upgraded from a poor card there is a high chance your power supply is not good enough. What is its rating? If its not from a quality manaufacturer it should be 400W minimum.
- Change the AGP speed to 4X - Does you MOBO even support the 4X agp the 9700 likes to run on? (alot of people have problems running it on 8X aswell)
- Turn off write combining
- Did you uninstall the previous cards drivers?
- Turn off the monitors DDC logic in the ATI driver. With a lot of non-brand name monitors this can cause problems with resolution switching and other random behaviour.

Good luck

 

[Blackstuff]

Thanks for the responses.

I've done some more rooting around on the Dell webbie.

Apparently the Dimension 4500 system supports both 2x and 4x AGP and the support/downloads section has driver updates for the 9700pro card so compatibility with the rest of the hardware shouldn't be the problem.

Guess I'll just need to experiment with older drivers etc.

Thx again.

 

[Sycho]

Any chance you can do a screenshot of it? is it multi coloured triangles?or many flickers of dots/lines?What power supply are you using?

You should try it in another pc if possible, if it works in another pc then you know it's not the card.(memory could be faulty on the card)

 

[Blackstuff]

According to the system configuration documentation for the Dell Dimension 4500 it should be a 250W PSU. I've no reason to think that there is anything different in the machine he was shipped but I'll check it out when I open it up tonight.

As far as the display problems are concerned there were a number of bands of thin purple-ish bands running vertically when looking at IE and Word. My mate reported that when he tried to play games the display shrunk to the centre of the screen and had 'shapes' radiating out towards the edges. He also claims the whole display blacked out on occasions and wouldn't come back until the system was rebooted.

 

[Sycho]

Try in another pc, if it works then it most likely be the psu(250watts is kind of low and ones that come with built pc's from major retailers/manufacturers usually aren't that good) if you get same problem then could be faulty memory which means can return to overclockers for another, i had a faulty motherboard but got a replacement one 4-5 days later.I am pretty sure 300w is roughly what 9700 pro needs, i could be wrong though.

 

[Ballard]

According to the system configuration documentation for the Dell Dimension 4500 it should be a 250W PSU. I've no reason to think that there is anything different in the machine he was shipped but I'll check it out when I open it up tonight.

As far as the display problems are concerned there were a number of bands of thin purple-ish bands running vertically when looking at IE and Word. My mate reported that when he tried to play games the display shrunk to the centre of the screen and had 'shapes' radiating out towards the edges. He also claims the whole display blacked out on occasions and wouldn't come back until the system was rebooted.

250W!! In my humble opinion this really isnt enough. Even if it was a top brand you might still have problems. If I recall correctly the radeon 9700 documentation even suggests 350W. When I had problems with my 9800pro it turned out to be a combination of the VIA chipset I was using and the power supply. Upgrading to a 600W PSU fixed virtually all my problems.