this card is driving me NUTS!! to put it bluntly its as follows:

i keep getting VPU recovery in both Vista ultimate 64 and 32. and also under Xp pro SP2(Tri Boot) when i play almost any game such as Call of Duty 4, Assasins Creed, GRID and so on, the VPU recovery sometimes also fails and i am left with my monitor in standby mode with no way of getting into my system without a hard reboot via the front panel reset switch, i made sure i had an ample power supply for the card and the other components inside my system, the PSU is a Corsair 650TX, 65 watts and 52amps on the +12 Dedicated rail, i have 2 ide hdd's, my dvd drive, 2 led fans and some front panel blue led's, my athlon 64 x2 5000+ and my motherboard to power, please advise.. as this is now the 3rd ati based gpu that i have had problems with, and this particular problem is stopping me from using the card in 3D intensive apps, and it doesnt get above 70 degrees centigrade at load. i tried half life 2 on it, same thing, i tried half life 2 lastnight with the onbard geforce 6100 and guess what, i played fine for hours, somethin bad is goin on....

ive modified the fan speed with riva tuner, it sets the fan sped at 73% upon restarting of windows too, but ive noticed that after a vpu recovery the settings in rivatuner revert back to auto dection of the speed needed per the heat being output from the card, but it does this AFTER the vpu recovery so i can understand it resetting rivatuner like that, ive contacted ati support via a ticket awaiting a response, im also gonna call ccl in the mornin to see about a possible rma, but i thought id see if anyone can give me any tips on this problem, because to be honest... ITS PISSIN ME OFF THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS A MONTH OLD!!!!! LOL!!!!

What kind of motherboard are you using? It sounds like something is wrong with your MB to me. Have you tried running Prime95?

lol ok yeah parts list right.... sorry guys wasnt with it on that side, here ya go:

Board: ABiT NF-M2SV
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ @ 2.61GHz (0%)
Display: Plug and Play Monitor on ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series @ 1024x768
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional (5.1.2600)
HDD Totals: 596.17GB Free: 82.42GB Used: 513.75GB (86.2%)
RAM Total: 2GB Used/Free: 0.57GB/1.43GB (71.5%)

thats from l33tsig, bare in mind i only run that when i wanna get my partial list of kit up lol, the main details are:

the ram is:2x1GB of crucial pc2-5300 ddr2
psu is already mentioned above

but yeah, my chipset is the geforce 6100 based 405 nforce chipset, ya think thats the root of my evils? baring in mind that hl2 runs fine without the card, im startin to think nforce chipsets are more trouble than they're worth aswell as ati gpu's lol

ps, l33tsig is reporting my ram usage backwards, it actually has the 1.43GB FREE lol!!

oh yeah, the hdd's, 2x maxtor diamondmax21 ide hdd's, identical models
1xx dvdrw LG multi dual layer drive

im new to postin in tech forums, as to be honest, ive never really needed to til now... this is my first "newer" rig too lol

ccl are testin the card, i'll know within 3 working days if its faulty or not, im seriously hopin it is faulty, then it'l get rma'd etc, id rather that than gojn back to the drawing board, ffs this is annoyin lol, id get an 8800GT but for features ati cards are cheaper than their nvidia counterparts

had to rma it as a faulty card, the replacement went exactly the same way in a short length of time, i ended up changin to an asus hd3870, not only is it a better card, but it runs a lot cooler without messin with fan speeds, take my advice, if that card is under waraanty, get rid of it and get somethin else man...

u should see that and fallout 3 on the 3870, beats the 3850 hands down, my second hd3850 was over 30 days but ccl do a 1 year warranty, i got lucky and got given a voucher towards the cost of th pile of crap, then put some extra cash towards this thing, i dont regret it one bit, as for the 8800gts, i had one in my system while my second hd3850 was bein checked out, it does a better job than the 3850 in race driver grid, but this 3870 does beat both... u should moan at newegg bigtime about gettin it replaced with a 3870 with a little extra cash that you put towards its cost, point them to the direction of this thread, and in the direction of ccl lol, they had 5 of them fail in one customers pc