Troubleshooting - Sapphire Radeon HD 3850

Over the summer, I built a new computer with a "SAPPHIRE 100226L Radeon HD 3850

512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16". It's worked great up until about a week

ago, and I've had non-stop problems since then.

Here's the original symptoms: occassional (but severe artifacting and VPU

recoveries during WoW, and BSODs (ati2dvag.dll) during any activity. ATITool

didn't show high temps under load, but I went ahead and applied some AS5 then

cleaned out the fan/heatsink. When the problem didn't improve, I tried a few

different ATI drivers, then finally settled with the latest Omega drivers. After

installing the drivers, I ran ATITool's artifact scanner for a few hours,

followed by all of yesterday playing WoW, and all problems seemed to have

disappeared.

It didn't last though. My new symptoms as of today are: occassional (but severe)

artifacting during WoW and random restarts.

The following is the system's specs.

Power Supply - APEVIA ATX-CW500WP4 500W
Motherboard - ECS AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX
Memory - G.SKILL 2 x 1GB DDR2 800
Video Card - SAPPHIRERadeon HD 3850 512MB
Processor - AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane 2.5GHz
Hard drive#1 - 80GB Seagate
Hard drive#2 - 250GB Seagate
Tablet - Genius G-Pen F610 6"x10" Ultra-Slim

The power supply is a bit on the low side for my setup, but it's been enough to play CoD4 and CoD: World at War at pretty high settings non-stop for months, so there should be no problems when playing WoW.

Also, I tried to step through every change that occurred before the problems started happening, but there are only two things I could think of: installing this new drawing tablet and moving the desk/computer. It doesn't seem logical that the tablet would be interfering so much with the video, but it's been unplugged since installation just incase (although there could be something wrong with the drivers/software causing all of this). The desk/computer move could have unseated something, so I reseated everything.

You guys have any ideas about what's going on with this? The only thing I haven't tried is updating the firmware of the video card or motherboard, but it seems like something else is going haywire.

Even better:

Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products.

Hello i have the same type of video card. SAPPHIRE HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 PCI-E
And when i am in windos just with a browser open and no other program running the cooler from the video card starts for a few seconds then stops agains. This is iritating and i dont think is normal. In game mode it works just fine. I tested with fallout 3 and NFS undercover.
what can i do? any ideeas? is natural to do so?

Excuse my bad english...
Many thanks.

I'm having the same problems, but kind of different . Some games including COD4 , Farcry 2, NFS-undercover work great , no crashes . When i run WoW , W3 , HOMM V , Neverwinter nights the screen freezes , and then it goes black , sometimes i can hear the sound freezing and after this , no VPU recovery and it reboots.
Somebody help , i heard that if you don't install the ATI catalyst center it will work but not sure.