XFX 6800 XT Problems

[flametank]

Ok, my friend just bought my old build from me when I upgraded. What was in the old build was:

ASUS Motherboard (dont remember exact model number) 4x AGP Slot
P4 2.4ghz Northwood Chip
2 Optical Drives
1 floppy drive
1 PATA Maxtor hard drive
Sound blaster Audigy Platinum
a 56k modem
MSI GeForce 4200 AGP 8x video card
420 watt PSU (i believe it was VANTEC or something, I know it wasn't a cheap brand)

He just upgraded the video card to an XFX Geforce 6800 XT AGP card a couple of days ago. He is having stability issues. At first it would just garble the image, he updated drivers to latest version didnt fix the problem. Now his computer locks up and sometimes restarts. This only happens when he plays a DX9 game. (Sometimes Windows XP Pro when it restarts said it recovered from a serious error related to the video card) Then he downgraded to the drivers that came on the CD... no help. He then formatted the hard drive and reinstalled everything from scratch. Same problems...

The manual for his 6800 says it requires a 500 watt PSU. I personally think this is BS (but I could be wrong).

Is this a power issue? Or just a driver problem or bad video card?

Thanks in advance for any help on this subject.

 

[Slava]

Chances are it is the power supply. 6800 series are very power hungry. Before he goes about replacing the power supply though he should try to use a different connector to power the card and make sure that no other devices are connected to the same power cable. He may also want to try temporarily disconnecting some of the other devices that draw power from the 12V rail to see if stability improves.

Also, he should check BIOS settings and see

1. What AGP voltage is set to. 6800 series are 1.5V cards.

2. What the AGP apperture is set to. I have a 6800 Ultra on Abit IS7 motherboard and I found that AGP apperture needs to be at least 64Mb (128Mb is ideal). Funny thing is that nVidia recommends setting AGP apperture to 4Mb but every time I tried this my PC either would not boot or crash or experience all sorts of stability issues. Then I read up on this extensively and found out that in reality the best AGP apperture (for this series of cards anyway) is actually 128MB.

 

[flametank]

Thank you very much, I'll have him try those things you mentioned.