Ok, got the new X850 Pro card in my system. Having issues with it rebooting the pc in certain games though (I haven't bothered with OCing it yet since I wanted to see what the frame rates were but haven't gotten that far yet). Windows, by itself will stay running for a couple of days but.... Here's some of the games and what they were doing.

Thief 3: plays for about 15-20 minutes, reboot.
MoH Pacific Assault: goes to main menu fine, loading any level or starting new game, reboot.
CoD 2 depends: sometimes play for about 10-15 and other times, loading mission and reboot.
MS Combat Flight Sim: plays just fine- for hours.
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3: plays for hours.

All of these played fine with my 9600 Pro just a little choppy in some parts.

That's all I've tried playin so far.

Ok, this is what I've done so far. Read Sig for system specs. I've updated the VIA chipset 4-in-1 (KT600 chipset) drivers to last on VIA's site, flashed the bios to the most current bios for the board (8-11-2004), uninstalled Omega drivers, reinstalled them, then uninstalled them and installed ATI's Cat 6.6, then uninstalled and installed Cat 6.7 (then new one's that just came out). Turned off AGP Fastwrite in the bios with AGP arpiture (?) set to 128. Still reboots though.

Ok, since updating the Bios and the VIA chipset drivers, CoD 2 and Thief 3 play with out rebooting. But MoD is worse. Doesn't even get to the menu screen now and it reboots. Since I've only got a 430watt power supply, I thought it might be power issue so I unplugged both cd rom drives (i've got no-cd crack for MoH) and took out the sound card thinking that it was pulling to much juice but still reboots. The only thing in the drivers that I have changed is forcing AA to 4X and turning off VSync. With the Bios update and the VIA drivers making a difference in some of the games, I'm wondering if it's not my mobo causing issues with it somehow. Any ideas?


Ok, take that back, after about 4 hours of playing Thief, damn thing rebooted....again. FarCry won't even load, gets half way through starting a mission, reb bar is going across the bottom of the screen, gets half way and Reboots (intro movie plays just fine and looks pretty good to). Not sure if this is a motherboard issue or windows issue or the card itself. ATI's website said requires a 350 watt PS and with not having much installed, I thought I'd be ok with having a 430watt. I don't know where to go with this, but it's getting irritating as hell. CPU is sitting around 45C (113 degrees), motherboard is sitting at 36C (97 degrees) and HD is at 33C (91 degrees) so I don't think it's that (that's right after quiting Thief after an hour of play (since it's the only game that seems to be working somewhat).

Thing is, when it runs, it runs smooth as silk. Thief has never looked or played smoother. CoD 2 looks sweet and I can't imagine what FarCry, America's Army, or MoH is going to look like....Once I can get the damn thing to run right. I'm going to bed, if anyone's got any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Might just end up reloading windows this weekend and see if that helps if nothing else does.

Ok, couldn't sleep so starting looking around the net for a posiable solution to this and looks like I'm buying a new PS just to be on the safe side. I'll post, once I get it installed and let you know. Mean while, if anyone else has some ideas, that would be great.

ah give these drivers a shot mate :)

Omega Drivers 6.03 not the newest but they surely rock!
http://www.treiberupdate.de/treiber-download/z-dltreiber/download_treiber_999a.php?load=154044&sys=WindowsXP

RadLinker for advanced settings also like FSAA and so on.
http://users.adelphia.net/~webspace/RadLinker2033.zip

RadClocker for OC'n:
http://users.adelphia.net/~webspace/RadClocker2030.zip

I use this combo with my R420 aka ATi M18 Mobillity Radeon 9800 AGP 256MB GDDR2 in my Dell Inspiron 9100 Xtreme and really everything runs without failures.

on the X1K cards Radlinker and Radclocker does not work, the X800 XT PE it works like a charm also on X850 XT PE cards so your X850 Pro should do fine :)

Random reboots are most likely the PSU... ;)

...especially with a new GFX card that MUNCHES power like the X850 does. ::)

Go for a 550-650 WATT PSU for good measure. 8)

What is the rating of your current PSU? ???

I agree with @Obi_Wan for drivers - Omega drivers ROX YOUR BOX! ;D

hmm I had and still make use of the Antec True Power 550P EPS12V PSU for the X800 XT PE AGP as for the X1900 XTX PCI-e for now with a VoodooMAC 5500 Proto next to it  so with a 550 Watter you should be okay :)

for the X850 Pro ViVo a 400 Watt PSU should be sufficiant as well just to save costs, take Antec or Enermax they really rock.

Picking up a PS today, the one I have a duel fan rated at 430 watts, not sure what brand, not at home right now. But the more I look at this, the more I think it is the PSU.

Ok, went out and got a 500 watt PS and that solved most everything. MoH Pacific Assault still reboots the system though. Think I might have found the problem but I'm not sure yet. I've got an extra 80 gig drive so I decided that with the new card and a AMD 3200+ and a gig of ram, I'd try out Vista on it. Well during the install, Vista blue screened with a Memory Management error. I'm in the process of reloading Vista on the drive but now I'm wondering if the problem with MoH rebooting might not have something to do with that. I'm not sure because FarCry, CoD 2, Thief 3 all run smooth as silk now though. If it was a memory problem, I'd be seeing it in more then just one game so I'm not sure what to think at this point. Once I get Vista installed, I'm going to plug my other drive back in that's got XP installed and run Sandra SiSoft on it and run the burn in test and see if I can't find something else out.

Ok, blue screened again. Stop code error is 0x0000008E and doing a look up on M$'s site shows that it's a memory issue. Have to install Sandra yet and run some test but this could be my issue all along (although new PS did help out a ton).

maybe you have some bad sectors on your HDD [Hard Drive]?
otherwise test some other ram or one ram stick lesser and start pulling out cards like soundcard, network card and so on untill the problem has dissapeared.

I hust hope you didn't buy a cheapo 500 Watt Sweex or Q-Tech PSU because they give less power than a 300 Watt Antec or Enermax and also create unstabillity as well, just because of the cheap parts which is used to build them and so on.

Not sure could be, I've got a floppy disk that runs PC Check, does read/ write test on the hard drive so I'm going to run that plus it does read/write test with memory as well. Just got to have some time to run it.

The PS that I bought is a Thermaltake duel fan 500 watt, so it should be ok. I've had pretty good luck with there CPU Heatsinks. The PS that I pulled out of here was a Enermax duel fan 430 watt so that'll be stored until one of the other boxes needs it.

wrote on 07.08.06 at 05:58:59:

Ok, blue screened again. Stop code error is 0x0000008E and doing a look up on M$'s site shows that it's a memory issue. Have to install Sandra yet and run some test but this could be my issue all along (although new PS did help out a ton).

MS has a great ram test utility.

Quote:

MS has a great ram test utility.

LOL! LMAO! And the cow jumped over the moon...

Seriously though, it could be a RAM issue.

What brand of DIMMs are you using?

Patriot Signature series. Got them through newegg.com for 66.99 on sale on April 3rd of this year. Here's the link, they raised the price on them, but it's what they are.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820220037

They are dual channel memory although my board doesn't support dual channel, figured I bought them when I did so that when I got around to do an upgrade I could use them then. I know, should have gotten Corsair or something but for the price I didn't think that I could go wrong, but looking back........

wrote on 07.08.06 at 13:39:26:

The PS that I pulled out of here was a Enermax duel fan 430 watt...

I aways had pretty good luck with Enermax PS in the past. I would have thought 430 would have been fine :-/

Now I'm a bit worried..  I have a TurboCool 450 (I think ??? )

I'm not sure, I'm back up north again and won't be back for two weeks :'(

I think your cool Gamma, I don't think it was the power supply to begin with. I'm having more and more problems with programs locking up and it's really looking like a memory issue. Sandra locked up on me while doing the memory bench mark and I can't get PC Check to run off the disk because my floppy drive seems to have taken a dump as well. Keeps asking "Please insert floppy disk into drive A:" and it's done that with 10 different floppy's. I'm about ready to throw the damn thing out the window at this point (minus the new card of course).

I put the X850 into my secondary machine that's a AMD 2100+,  512 ram with a Enermax 400 watt in it and it's working just fine. CoD 2, FarCry, America's Army, Thief 3, RCT 3 (my daughter loves that game), Rainbow Six 3 all played just fine with it. No reboots, no lock ups no anything.

hay Gam,ma742 norries mate I still use an Enermax 350 watter in the XP 2700+ with a Leadtek GeForce 6800AGP and a 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI and still no hickups nothing, so kinda strange that a 430 watter would be unstable then , hmmm, unless the X850 Pro uses more power than a 6800AGP 128MB and a 5500 PCI togeather, that is something I doubt though. :-/

your 450 watter should do fine if it works perfect why make a change ;)

wrote on 08.08.06 at 15:06:47:

hay Gam,ma742 norries mate I still use an Enermax 350 watter in the XP 2700+ with a Leadtek GeForce 6800AGP and a 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI and still no hickups nothing, so kinda strange that a 430 watter would be unstable then

Not all power supplies are of good quality regardless of wattage.

Regularity of voltage, amp rating of certain rails, cleaness of signal are more important then peak wattage rating.

yeah, and like said earlier, I popped the x850 in my secondary box with a 400 watt enermax with no issues. My main box is just messed up at the moment.

yep, one of the memory sticks was bad. Couldn't run PC Check on it, because of the floppy drive being out so I did the normal fix for this, took out each stick, reboot, try a game, if it crashed, tried the other stick. Some of the games are a little choppy with only 512, but at least I can play now. MoH doesn't reboot the system anymore although when you first get into a map it's laggy for the first 30 seconds, after that it's smooth. Once I get the memory replaced everything should be back to normal.

GAH - I hate to be right sometimes! :P

Bad RAM is someting I wouldn't wish on anyone... ::)

...still beats Fujitsu HDD drives though! :o

Their Advertising slogan should be... ;D

"Fujitsu HDD - produced in the fires of hell!" >:(

...I had three Fujitsu drives die completely on me a long time ago... :P

Switched to Western Digital and never looked back! 8)

Although I'm kind of irritated that it's the memory, I'm glad that it's all it was. Can RMA through newegg.com for a year on all their products (well most anyway) and the Patriot series has a life time garantee (how ever long that truely is, who knows but....) so I'm getting those replaced.

I've switched to Seagate drives though, three year warranty on all their drives compared to year warranty with WD and haven't had any problems so far. We'll see how it goes though. I've seen a lot of WD drives go out on the Dells that we service which isn't encouraging at all as far as what I see, part of the main reason I switched.  

well i hope that the reliabillyty of those seagates stay's the same, since, not so long ago,Seagate bought up Maxtor, my experience with Maxtor wasn't such a safe reliable trip, let hope that Seagate just builds thier drives still in thier way and not the way Maxtor did  :-/

In the last 3 mounths I had 5 Maxtor Deaths.

2x DiamondMAX9+ 40GB 7200rpm
2x DiamondMAX9+ 60GB 7200rpm
1x DiamondMAX9+ 80GB 7200rpm

yaaay, okay the drives I use now are 2 Maxtors as well the only 2 left overs that do thier work propperly.

1x DiamondMAX10+  40GB 7200rpm as Drive C
1x DiamondMAX10+ 160GB 7200rpm as Drive D

heh, no more Maxtors for me , if I'll do a HDD upgrade it will deffintely be Western Digital or Seagate unless Seagate went Maxtors way also lol.

I own a lot of Maxtor drives but Seagate drives are better.

I love my Seagate drives so far, as far as Maxtor I realize that Seagate bought them out, but I wouldn't touch them with a 10' foot pole or even recommend them to someone I didn't like. The ratio of HD's that I change out for Dell between Maxtor and WD is almost 50/50. Now, I know Dell uses different brands other then those two and I don't know what those percentages are but if I'm changing out 6 drives for that week, two of them would be Maxtor, two would be WD with the other two either being one Seagate and one Hitachi/IBM and/or Samsung (just an example of what I've run across). The other factor in this is that I know Dell uses the cheaper WD Caviar series in the home PC's and with both the Maxtor and WD's it seems to be the SATA drives that crash out more then the regular ATA drives.

The other thing that I've realized doing Dell warranty work is, unless AMD goes bankrupt or in any other fassion ceast to exist, I will NEVER own an Intel machine. At least not with an Intel motherboard. For as many motherboards that I change out in a week, Intel does the M$ thing, push it out now, fix it later.