Radeon 9600 Pro Locks up Randomly - ati2dvag.dll error - Infinite loop

[Pera]

I just put new parts in my computer couple days ago and I started having this problem. Whenever I play Dark Age of Camelot, the game randomly freezes and locks up the computer. What exactly happens is the game suddenly freezes and stay that way for about 30-45 secs. then screen goes blank and re-apperas with this messy graphics. like all the colors are messed up and all I see is vertical lines accross the screen. Finally the computer Reboots.

One time I actually got a blue screen with the error message saying that ati2dvag.dll caused an error and something about an infinite loop. Here is my old system specs. Played DAOC with NO lock ups or freezes for a year.

AMD Athlon XP 1500+
512 mb DDR ram
Gigabyte Radeon 9600 Pro
400w PSU

Upgraded it to:

AMD Sempron 64 3000+
1512 mb DDR ram (3 x 512mb)
Gigabyte Radeon 9600 Pro (same card)
400w PSU (same psu)

Now the things I have done so far.

1) Tried to run the game with the old 512 ram only. New mobo + cpu. DAOC locks up

2) Put in the new 2 x 512 mb ram to have 1512 ram. new mobo+cpu. DAOC locks up.

3) tried ATI drivers 5.10 5.9 5.2. 1512 ram. new mobo+cpu. DAOC locks up.

4) Turned off Fast Writes and bring the AGP speed down to 4x. DAOC locks up.

When I go back to my house, I am going to try to bumb up the AGP voltage to 1.6 or higher from BIOS and also try to blow a fan in the case to make sure nothing is overheating. Although I know my CPU is not Overheating because right after the reboot I check my CPU temp. and its running around 29-31 C.

I really appreciate any kind of help since this is really annoying and would like to get it fixed.

Thank you so much in advance

 

[Ballard]

When I go back to my house, I am going to try to bumb up the AGP voltage to 1.6 or higher from BIOS and also try to blow a fan in the case to make sure nothing is overheating. Although I know my CPU is not Overheating because right after the reboot I check my CPU temp. and its running around 29-31 C.

When i had exactly the same problem as you describe on my 9800 pro, changing the AGP voltage fixed it for me. If i recall corectly setting it to 1.8v was required for me.

 

[Tuppe]

hmm you using catalyst drivers?
if so, dont install control panel or what ever its named when updating drivers.
when updating drivers you get 2 choices what install, dont install control panel!
made my pc freez time by time 1 week, and tryed everyting before remember control panel and problem what had earlier.

 

[Pera]

When i had exactly the same problem as you describe on my 9800 pro, changing the AGP voltage fixed it for me. If i recall corectly setting it to 1.8v was required for me.

Hpow exactly did you incresaed the voltage? Also would it be a different voltage for 9600pro?

 

[Ballard]

If you can do it on your motherboard it will be in the bios. Not all motherboards support changing it but alot will.

 

[Pera]

ok so I went home last nite and tried a couple different things.



1) Turned down the AGP speed to 4x.

2) Turned off the Fast Write.

3) Upped the voltage about 10% from the original.

4) Rolled back the drivers to 4.12.



Now the game seems to work more stable, but it still locks up the pc. However this time the computer does not reboot and the game just freezes. Also now it seems like it only crashes after about 1 hour or 1.5 hours into gaming. I dled 3dmark and some other pc benchmarking software and my pc ran through them just fine without any lock ups. Also downloaded speed fan. My cpu runs at 31C during gaming and the vid card gets up to 55C.



I am out of options but I still don' think its the psu because its not that my computer just reboots during gaming, but it is the fact that the game locks up my pc and if I don't hard reboot it, it stays that way. I also don' think its the vid card going bad because the vid card worked perfectly fine till about 3 days ago when I put in the new mobo+cpu and rams.



I guess I am just out of luck...

 

[LordjOX]

Had the same problems ages ago on Radeon 9800 PRO. (current gfx aswell)
Started asking around for different causes, ppl said overheating CPU, weak PSU blahblah. Bought new bits and bobs, leet CPU cooler, GFX card cooler, new strong bZerk PSU. Nothing helped.
Turned fastwrite and AGP completely off, atleast daoc worked w/o crashes. Altho other games played more sluggish, daoc was stable w/o crash or lag.
Have in mind this only happened to daoc, no other game.

Upgraded drivers maybe 6 months later, where the lockups were fixed so the installer set AGP to 8x and fastwrite to OFF by default. Worked really nice until I had to format all drives and lost what driver version I was using.

Currently traversing from newest to older ATI CATALYST driver versions
On my comp spec:
AMD64 3000+
1GB DDR RAM
RADEON 9800 PRO
500W PSU
WINDOWS 2000

Conclusions:
CATALYST 5.10 (newest) - stable but horrible fps lag after 15-30 mins of RvR (dunno why) - seen other have same prob.
CATALYST 5.9 - unstable, comp lockup and freeze after ~10 mins of idling in Forest Sauvage
CATALYST 5.8 - currently trying out....

My tip to you would be to try newest, then older drivers until daoc to run stable.
If nothing at all seems to be wrong with mobo, cpu, psu, heating, newest chipset drivers etc etc etc.
My experience is that the Catalyst drivers are utter bolloxing shit and not proper configured for daoc at all.

 

[Pera]

Well I finally found the problem after trying many many different things... the problem is with the ATI drivers conflicting with the Catacombs and DR game clients. I played DAOC last nite for about 5 hours with ToA client and didn't have any lock ups nor reboots.

So I am now convinced that if I ever get a new vid card, I will rather never have a sexual intercourse with a woman ever again then buying another ATI card. It was a relief though to find out that nothing is wrong with my hardware.

I am still trying to find a driver that workd with DR. So far I have tried 5.10 5.9 5.8 5.6 and 4.12 neither that worked.

 

[LordjOX]

Ah, which version of the drivers do you use that are stable with ToA ?
I only play ToA client in RvR and RvR is what I do mostly
Testing 5.8 atm and they seem fine.... but the gfx lockup / crash can come at any time tbh

 

[Pera]

I am using 4.12 however my pc runs ToA with 5.10 perfectly fine. So we may be having 2 different problems.

But I highly recommend you to visit this website

http://www.techspot.com/vb/menu15.html

Read the top sticky about the minidumps. Collect 3-4 of them and zip it. Then post your problem with the minidump files. There are people on those forums that can look at your error message generated by windows and tell you exactly what is wrong. It helped me a lot at the first place because they told me right when I post it that it was a driver conflict.

 

[LordjOX]

Aye, but I'm not getting "blue screens" as said on that site. Using 5.6 drivers atm, seem to be working fine, but sluggish in RvR but I don't wanna hassle more with it

This site helped me out abit:
http://www.squeakfix.co.uk/

 

[Ballard]

By the way, turn off VPU recover if you have it on. Tts really a waste of time and generally only makes things worse.

Id also try the omega drivers if you dont like ATIs. They work far better on my system (faster and less crashes). Can be retrived from http://www.omegadrivers.net/

 

[Corran]

Had the same problems ages ago on Radeon 9800 PRO. (current gfx aswell)
Started asking around for different causes, ppl said overheating CPU, weak PSU blahblah. Bought new bits and bobs, leet CPU cooler, GFX card cooler, new strong bZerk PSU. Nothing helped.
Turned fastwrite and AGP completely off, atleast daoc worked w/o crashes. Altho other games played more sluggish, daoc was stable w/o crash or lag.
Have in mind this only happened to daoc, no other game.

Upgraded drivers maybe 6 months later, where the lockups were fixed so the installer set AGP to 8x and fastwrite to OFF by default. Worked really nice until I had to format all drives and lost what driver version I was using.

Currently traversing from newest to older ATI CATALYST driver versions
On my comp spec:
AMD64 3000+
1GB DDR RAM
RADEON 9800 PRO
500W PSU
WINDOWS 2000

Conclusions:
CATALYST 5.10 (newest) - stable but horrible fps lag after 15-30 mins of RvR (dunno why) - seen other have same prob.
CATALYST 5.9 - unstable, comp lockup and freeze after ~10 mins of idling in Forest Sauvage
CATALYST 5.8 - currently trying out....

My tip to you would be to try newest, then older drivers until daoc to run stable.
If nothing at all seems to be wrong with mobo, cpu, psu, heating, newest chipset drivers etc etc etc.
My experience is that the Catalyst drivers are utter bolloxing shit and not proper configured for daoc at all.

Uncron, dont know if you sorted this issue, kinda assume you have but i was having problems with lockups etc and could only place it to my 9800 Pro.

Managed to fix it in end by

Reinstalling Mobo drivers(updated them for the sake of it)
Using catalyst uninstaller and getting rid of all that.
After reboot i install 5.2 catalyst drivers.

Framerate is lower then it used to be, however i can run around the frontiers and no longer freeze up

 

[LordjOX]

Aye fixed it by similar approach, using 5.6 catalyst atm and it's just fine

 

[Corran]

Aye fixed it by similar approach, using 5.6 catalyst atm and it's just fine

Getting some extra fps lag with 5.2.. tempted to try upgrade to a newer version but i dont wanna start chain freezing again when running in opted groups... least teh fps lag gives extra warning of inc