Legit Reviews

First of all, i'm new here. I've read these forums for a while now but decided to register since i've got a serious problem on my hands:
Yesterday i bought a PowerColor X800 Pro. I removed the drivers from my old card (Geforce 5600), shut down my pc, took the old one out and installed the new one. I installed the drivers that came with the X800.
Now when i play games (Quake 4/Doom 3/Serious Sam 2), my system crashes. It just freezes when i'm only a couple of seconds in the game. After that i get a blue screen. But not the standard Windows BSOD, this one has no error code whatsoever and has a different shade of blue.

What i've tried already:
- Reinstall drivers, the one from the cd and the latest from the ati site, after using the ati driver removal tool
- Used drivercleaner, and installed the Omega drivers
- Checked IRQ's
- Checked temperatures: Mobo 41 Celsius, CPU 45, GPU 47, GPU environment 43, so that's nothing spectacular.

My system:
Asus MB K8V SE Deluxe
AMD Athlon64 3200
1 gb mem
2 x Maxtor 160Gb SATA
Iiyama E481S-S 19 inch TFT
Creative Inspire P580 5.1 speakerset
Zalman CNPS 7000A-CU
Terratec Aureon 5.1
Windows XP SP2, up to date

Does anybody have a clue? I don't Thanks in advance for your help!

could be a faulty card right out of the box.....I've not really dealt with PowerColor, or have heard of anyone in here using one, so there must be a reason. What I did hear from one of my friends once was that they don't have the best quality of graphics cards (fried his card the first day he used it, and that was stock settings, come to find out the fan pinout on the card was faulty due to a cold solder, but he was stuck with it because bzboyz kept saying it was his fault and wouldn't take his RMA, so he decided to get a Sapphire card, which he still uses to this day), so we could be dealing with a memory or GPU issue here.

PowerColor is a BIG GFX card maker..... they are under the "TUL" brand, They are one of ATI's biggest cusomers! I have a x800pro hard modded to a x800pro xtpe and have never had an issue with it....

-->> Stygmata --> Do you get a "VPU Recover" error? If so then it can be a Directx, driver or hardware error

r-click my computer / goto manage / then Event viewer / check under application and system - check if there is any errors (major ones usually come up in red)

Does the pc reboot? if not then it is deff. not a BSOD

Is the card overclcoked? I know your temps are cool but still, mayby try default speeds.

go to driverheaven.net, and download DriveCleaner pro. When you run the tool have it remove all Nvidia and ATI drivers, and try a reinstall of the drivers. It is quite possible that there are remnants of the old drivers that is causing some type of corruption, that cause the card and the games you are playing to freak out and freeze. Also if the problem still persists try to get your hands on another card to try. If the new card works, then the other one is bad

also for some reason this screams to me underpowered card. What psu are you running? Does the computer restart under any other high load situation?

Agreed. Sounds like a low power issue.

d'oh .....looks like I forgot one, lol; yeah, you guys are right about the juice, I don't think it's getting enough either now that I've had time to think about it. good luck man, hope the card is ok

If it a low-power issue -> try running with 1 hdd, 1 stick of ram and underclock the cpu a little...then see if prob re-occurs? -> just incase something esle is causing it....you don't want to go a buy a new PSU for nothing!

kenc51 wrote:-->> Stygmata --> Do you get a "VPU Recover" error? If so then it can be a Directx, driver or hardware error

Nope.

kenc51 wrote:Does the pc reboot? if not then it is deff. not a BSOD

Nope.

kenc51 wrote: Is the card overclcoked? I know your temps are cool but still, mayby try default speeds.

And nope again.

Thank you guys for helping me out. Come tuesday, i'm getting a 450 Watt power supply, which should do the job i hope. I'll let you know wether or not it works out. Thanks again!

ok, the new 450 w power supply didn't do the trick either, neither did a reinstall of windows. So my last resort was to send the card back to the supplier. It turns out the fúcker's broken and there aren't any new cards available
But they did offer me a PowerColor X800 GTO ViVo in return. Is it any good?

Stygmata wrote:ok, the new 450 w power supply didn't do the trick either, neither did a reinstall of windows. So my last resort was to send the card back to the supplier. It turns out the fúcker's broken and there aren't any new cards available
But they did offer me a PowerColor X800 GTO ViVo in return. Is it any good?

that card is a super card!!!! you can OC the hell out of it if you want and also can unlock un-used pipelines to make it a full 16 pipe x800!!!! look here

Guess we will see you soon in the modding section ;)

kenc51 wrote:PowerColor is a BIG GFX card maker..... they are under the "TUL" brand, They are one of ATI's biggest cusomers! I have a x800pro hard modded to a x800pro xtpe and have never had an issue with it....

-->> Stygmata --> Do you get a "VPU Recover" error? If so then it can be a Directx, driver or hardware error

r-click my computer / goto manage / then Event viewer / check under application and system - check if there is any errors (major ones usually come up in red)

Does the pc reboot? if not then it is deff. not a BSOD

Is the card overclcoked? I know your temps are cool but still, mayby try default speeds.

i Think i have that VPU recovery program, is there a way to unistall directx because i can't find it.

i used to get this

i cleaned the drivers, and now i get minor faults, but nothing that radical. And then i get an error message ( didnt get a chance to take a screenshot yet)

Antonik wrote:"i Think i have that VPU recovery program, is there a way to unistall directx because i can't find it.

VPU recover is built into ATI's drivers, if your card crashes, it allows you to get back into you desktop inteasd of having to reboot. If your card crashes you get an error saying something about vpu recover. (you should reboot anyway!) There is a tick-box in the driver settings to disable...but no need really.
Directx cannot be uninstalled, or at least officially...there are ways to do it, I haven't tried or ever will. It's a major part of your OS. If it is an OS/Directx issue you can try system file checker, it will scan all system files and repair/replace anything thats corrupt. (goto start -> run - type "sfc/scannow" and have your XP cd ready)
Can also try directx diagnostics - again goto start and run and tyep in "dxdiag" - then run the tests and check the "Directx Files" page, make sure it says "No problems found." @ the bottom. --> Mayby try reinstall directx.

I really don't know what's causing that corruption sorry!

yep, pretty well stumped here too.....

considering I'm a network guy, something we've always been taught was that if there's a problem, it's usually a Layer 1 (physical layer) problem, but that mainly applies to networks......However I tend to adopt that as well with computers, though I do software checks first. If all else fails, in this case, I would try a different video card just to isolate the problem...and if it does the same thing (artifacting in-game) then I would have to suspect most definitely another piece of hardware is going bad......IMO, you should always look to hardware once you exhaust software diagnostics and fixes, but that's just me.

Antonik this actually looks a bit like it's overheating! pls...get a extra fan and place it so it blows on the card...then test again....I suspect this is a heat issue, I know you said temps are fine...humor me!

As Killswitch pointed out, it could be hardware.

kenc51 wrote:Antonik this actually looks a bit like it's overheating! pls...get a extra fan and place it so it blows on the card...then test again....I suspect this is a heat issue, I know you said temps are fine...humor me!

As Killswitch pointed out, it could be hardware.

ahh sorry i jumped into the guys' thread cause i thought we had the same problem, and i didnt prvoide any temps. I have no idea what the temp is because FanSpeed and atitools show it as 0 degrees. Ill do the system check now, then maybe rid the case of the dust. If not the card is going back to newegg i guess.

kenc51 wrote:Antonik this actually looks a bit like it's overheating! pls...get a extra fan and place it so it blows on the card...then test again....I suspect this is a heat issue, I know you said temps are fine...humor me!

As Killswitch pointed out, it could be hardware.

yeah, you like being "humored" quite frequently don't you ken, roflol

yeah though, better cooling could help the problem, something aftermarket like something from the Silencer series by Arctic Cooling, or even an interesting little mod one of our forum members, sbohdan, managed with an SI-97 if I can remember correctly:

http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=3263

I know it's a mod with a 6800LE, but I'm pretty sure you can tweak it to fit the application here.

yep, it might be a heat issue, so before you RMA or buy anything try this: open your cases side panel and direct a big desktop fan on your video card. if that helps, then it is a heat problem and you should get a better aftermarket cooler (zalman heatpipe, NVsilencer etc.) or do a cooling mod with a CPU cooler installed on the card. if the memory chips don't have any cooling (which is often the case), then you can get a set of videocard memory cooling set or cut some up on your own. of course if the fan won't make any diffrerence than RMA is a likely option.

hey sbohdan, you think the SI-97 mod would work on an X800 as well? I've been looking at their prices and they are a deal cheaper than the card I really want (by about a 100 bucks or better: $219 as opposed to like $365 for the XFX 7800, but perhaps I shouldn't be comparing the two even if the core clock is close)....I dunno, whaddya think of the X800 Pro GPU?

well, I don't know if it would fit on a x800pro (it really depends on the size of the PCB) but I found you a much better deal then the pro. check this out:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814142052

the GTO is a much better card then the pro and OC's like hell. you could also possibly open up the extra 4 pipes (it allready has 12) and turn it to X800XT PE !

EDIT: I actually checked the customer feedback and this card rocks!

Unlockable for sure
It unlocks to a x850xt. My 3d05 score jumped from 2500 on my radeon 9800 pro to 6300 with this bad boy! SWEET. Could be the jump from INTEL to AMD though too...

Flashed this card to a x800XT bios and instantlywas recognized as x800XT :D all 16pipelines. Max stable OC was around 575/1120 but very hot! Cononect3D does use a nice cooler though (copper i think) with silver grease. I replaced the cooler though. Sapphire x800gto2 is unlockable to x850XT but for $100 more? not worth it in my opinion. great performance for the value!

also a better deal then the pro (which only has 8 pipes) is the new 6800GS which comes in both pCI-E and AGP and OC's like crazy surpassing my efforts with the LE, without the SI-97 (just think what it could do with it
)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814133159

or you could save more and do what I did. get an LE with 256mb gddr3 (diquised GT) and open it up + OC with good cooling.

or this 6800 vanilla (12 pipes) has the ultras double slot cooling and for $173 sounds pretty good. you could open up the 4 pipes and OC without the need for better cooling

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814140067
so what do you say?