Did my Sapphire Radeon X800 XL cause this problem?

[precinct]

Hello folks, i'm afraid my first post is a tale of woe!

Hopefully you can see my set up in my sig!

My PC had been on for about 9 hours straight (downloading and about 2 hours playing HL2).
As i retired to bed i decided to watch an episode of 'Invasion' on the puter and set the DIVX file going. I fell asleep.

I woke up about 5 hours later and the monitor was displaying a mess of garbled colours and patterns. I rebooted to be greeted by a black screen with what looked like white cursors all over it. A third reboot brought about a blank screen, no POST but all fans whirring away. The mobo green light was on so i tried again. This time there was no activity from the master HDD (IDE). The SATA was spinning nicely.
I carried on rebooting with diminishing returns (at one point the master HDD started to spin only when the IDE cable was disconnected!?)
Eventually the power switch wouldn't even get the fans whirring. The green mobo light remained on, however.

My HDD's are fine (thank the lord) and working on my girlfriends PC (im using them at the moment).

After leaving my PC unplugged for about an hour i started it up with basic components (Radeon, mem stick, cpu) and the beeps and POST all worked fine.
(although ive never seen a POST or any text relating to the X800 during boot up ever, why is that?)

Anyhow, to troubleshoot, i removed one component at a time and rebooted getting all the correct warnings ( NO MEM etc).

When i finally removed the PSU i noticed that pin 11 (with one orange and one brown wire attached to it) was slightly burnt. Luckily there was no similar damage to the corresponding connector on the MOBO. The PSU was obviously still working but i decided to take no more chances and left it disconnected.

My first step tomorrow will be to buy a replacement (and more powerful) PSU, but beyond that i am completely stumped. I cant use my girlfriends PSU for testing as it doesnt have the 4-pin, 12 volt plug need to boot the mobo. My system is hardly power hungry, the Zalman should have coped well. I was told that plugging the PSU's 20 pin plug into the mobo's 24 pin connector was fine.

The A8N mobo had given me boot problems before (missing NTLDR and HAL.DLL) but a bios upgrade and a reformat had my system running really smoothly.

Any ideas as to where this problem originated?

What else could be damaged?

I'd only just updated all the Catalyst software from the ATI site and theres a chance i may have set the refresh rate higher than the recommended limit for my monitor.

I know this sounds like a PSU problem but the graphics 'disturbance' preceeded it so i thought i'd stick it in here.


Any ideas as to what my next step should be would be greatly appreciated.

Mike.

p.s. i use a Belkin surge protector for my all PC equipment.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

If your mainboard has a 24 pin ATX12V/EPS12V power plug, then it is highly recommended a PSU with the 24 pin connector is used with it.

However, a 20-pin connector power connector can be used in most cases w/o any issues at all - They should only fit one way, oriented to one side. (No other combinations should fit).

Doing this over 6 month periods, while using the PC (even at light load) for long periods (say over 12 hours, too many variables) could cause the PSU to fail. (The board never existed when the PSU was made, so testing for 'forwards compatibility' was not possible, it only works 'most' of the time).

So simply replacing your PSU should fix the issue (by the sounds of it).

If your video card is still giving your issues afterwards, esp in 'nVidia - the way it was meant to be played titles', or when playing back video, etc then read on: (Hopefully someone will do an article on this one day, even though the news is 12 months old, it needs some ****ing coverage )

Some of the earlier released X800 cards have a video memory timing misconfiguration. (I joke not, and I know people here will refute this simply because they are unfamilar with it, sad but true). This may, or may not, be related to the problem you experienced, but sounds like it is.

This could cause problems playing back video or gaming or performing 3D accelerated work for extended periods.

Some time around March - April in 2005 a new ATI Video BIOS was released, with new timings for video memory.

The fix is not documented (very well ?) in any 'public' parts of the Internet as far as I am aware, however the timings changed (for the X800 XL) were:

Note: the (from X/Y) timings may differ from card to card.
- TRP and TRAS raised to 6/7 (from 5/6)
- TR2W lowered to CL+2 (from CL+3)
- TW2R lowered to 1 (from 2)
- TRFC lowered to 20 (from 22)

The new BIOS (ATI 009.007.001.004) may have changed other things aswell, I can only work with the information available to me and am extremely lucky to have just the above.

Note: Normally I do not recommend flashing the Video Card BIOS, esp if not required. (It is a simple procedure and takes under 5 minutes if it works though).

Worse yet, Many manufacturers refuted the problems existed (as admission of some guilt = some liability in business, since they all modified the ATI supplied source BIOS) & are are not supplying the new BIOS to fix it 12 months later. (ATI 009.007.001.004 contains the fix.)

The problem affects many Battlefield 2 players, as the issues seam quite apparent in BF2, less so in Half-Life 2 though. It also affected video playback quality and caused similar problems to what you describe.

The best way to fix it is to 'refurbish' the card using a BIOS from another manufacturer (once again, no joke), as the GPU, logic, and video RAM is the same on most X800 series cards, they get made then just rebadged with logos so it works (so long as you're familar with the process).

An alternative is to use ATI Tray Tools to fix the problems.

The manufacturer of my card was uninterested, or lacked business procedures, to repond to my continued é-mails, RMAing the card doesn't fix it, so only final option was to reflash with another BIOS (suggest Gigabyte).

Note that not all X800 cards are affected, but a significant enough portion, and BF2 / HL2 is not the only games that exhibits problems, BF2 being far more major after 30-60 minutes of play one notices massive rendering errors.

If you can't change the timings, although ATI Tray Tools makes this easy, then underclock the video RAM to 933 (from 980/1000) with the same 'faulted' timings.

The above information needs to credit the dedicated hardware enthusiests, techs, and engineers for its 'discovery', permission to quote it in part or in full can be obtained by e-mail: darkpeace@internode.on.net


Unfortunately the errata (Above in small, copy to notepad or raise font size to read) received no media attention, most 'technical' (cough) websites never noticed it in their 'so called extensive testing' (they get given hand picked 'golden sample' cards most the time, and don't always look for the 1st gen/1st firmware/BIOS gear, sometimes avoiding it deliberately), and many gamers (esp of BF2, the issues most noticable in that game) just purchased an nVidia Video cards to fix it.... and who can blame them.

EA / DICE have never researched the problem, as it is not their fault and they are not liable at all for the game not working on 'a minority of systems'. (ie: Anything under 50% is 'acceptable', ideally much lower though ).

Chances are, it is just the PSU in your case but I've seen similar issues on similar PCs (even with the 24 pin ATX12V PWR connector) but that did have cards using the the ATI X800 XL VPU/GPU. (There is a reason I still use one despite my other specs).

Shortly after the fault above an ass kicking occured going downhill from ATI regarding companies not following multiple aspects of the reference designs well enough. (ie: The refererence designs are to define the minimum acceptable configurations, stability, etc and they were not being met on all varients of all cards). No doubt this affected sales / stock prices, which is when management started to care..... around this time the previous year the ATI CEO resigned. He obviously knew they'll have trouble increasing sales, revenue, profits and market share in the 2-5 years ahead, and left on a high note.

 

[precinct]

Thank you so much Tabris for your reply.

This incident was really depressing as i'd had issues booting (involving me having to use data retrieval software to save my data from a SATA drive)
I know the A8N SLI can be problematic so this is another part of the puzzle i have to consider.

Thing is, this build is only a month old and the HL2 session (lasting two hours) was the first real test the X800 had to deal with. I'd only just begun to play the game and the card coped really well apart from the occassional skip during the opening scenes. I also noticed DIVX playback in WMP is a bit sticky but i put this down to the quality of the downloaded files. The fact that the graphic SPLURGE that i saw occured after the card was handling a relatively simple task (i.e. playing back a video file) confuses me.

IF it turns out my X800 has problems (like the ones you describe) could this have led to the power up problems i described, including the burning of pin 11?

Could having accidently set the refresh rate ridiculously high, whilst tinkering with the ATI software, caused a strain on the PSU?

IF it was just a PSU problem (or a surge or spike) is the graphic corruption on my monitor a typical symptom of this?

The 20-pin PSU connected to a 24-pin board was an issue that had caused me concern, but i had been reassured that becasue i wasn't crossfiring with two graphics cards and had a relatively modest set up, the 20-pin, 400 watt Zalman was adequate for the job.

I'm hoping its just the PSU thats damaged but setting everything up again with a new one (i'm too impatient to return it to the resellers, even though it started working again) and just waiting to see what happens is going to be a nervy experience!

Mike.