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.

Welcome to the forums!

500W is fine, but that brand is not good.
Better to get a decent one.
I attribute the restarts to the PSU.

Top Tier PSU:

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 62-32.html

http://www.tomswiki.com/page/Tiere [...] ngs?t=anon

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=108088

http://www.anandtech.com/casecooli [...] spx?i=3359

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/323050.aspx

http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1460

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 43-24.html

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16073/15

Silent PSUs
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article699-page1.html

AMD Certified PSUs (Single+Crossfire):
http://ati.amd.com/online/certifiedpsu/index.html

Certified SLI-Ready Power Supplies
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html

Hybrid-Power (Hybrid SLI) power supplies:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/gefor [...] upply.html

I have had a Sapphire 3850 artifact on me and I replaced it.

Yeah get rid of the Apevia. And actually, 500w is overkill for that system. I ran a HD3850 and a e2180 o'ced to 3.15 Ghz on an Earthwatts 380, never had any problems whatsoever.

I've got the Sapphire HD 3850 512 video card as well. And I've been experiencing somewhat similiar problems, in that I get a complete screen freeze rather than a restart or a bsod.

But since I installed the video-card it was freezing with every game within minutes of playing them, especially WoW. After reformatting and reinstalling the drivers it was still freezing, when I updated the drivers it ran WoW fine for about six hours, and then froze, and now its back to freezing within minutes of playing a game. So I'd be pretty interested if you managed to fix your problem