Radeon 8500 Hardware Conflict?

[Guest]

I've recently purchased a Radeon 8500. Upon setting it up in my system, it worked beautifully, but then I tried to run something (anything) 3d (D3D/OGL) based. It ran, about long enough to grab a very sweet benchmark of 8082 3D marks. Then, upon running UT, after about 5 minutes, it hung. Complete halt. AGP was set to 4X in bios, Aperture was 64MB, fast writes off, all settings set properly. CPU never broke 40 degrees C. After testing multiple times, its not repeatable at the same period of time, it is just repeatable in that it happens sometime while running anything 3D. It displays the desktop fine. I then tested the card in another system. (P3 733, VC820 Intel desktop board). In the test rig, the card performed fine, and did not exhibit any crashes or hangs as it does in the Athlon based system. Then I began to read up on it, to find that other people are having similar troubles with the very same chipset that is in the system it is having trouble with- KT266A.
Has anyone got any ideas on this, or is it as I believe to be; an issue that ATI must fix, with either a BIOS upgrade on the card, or a complete revision of the card, and possibly a new driver revision.
Here is my system for reference:
Athlon XP 1800+ (1533Mhz)
Soyo Dragon + (KT266A Chipset)
Radeon 8500 (V5500 in the meantime until its fixed)
CL SB Audigy
Netgear FA312
Adaptec 2940U2W
The Radeon 8500, the NIC, and the soundcard are all on their own personal IRQ, and I've tried messing with AGP1/2/4X, Wait states on the AGP bus, Post writes, and almost anything else I could figure, including a complete fresh install to insure no other drivers were conflicting. I've tried all versions of drivers from ATI, Win XP Pro, Win98SE. Always loaded in Via 4 in 1 4.35. If at the very least you are experiencing a similar problem, please post so I can get a picture of how many people are having the problem, and how many people are emailing ATI to get it fixed. Thanks!

 

[AMD_Man]

First of all, are you running the latest version of UT? Secondly, I would set the AGP Aperture size to 128MB if you have 256MB or more RAM.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Crashman]

VIA has always had this AGP problem, card manufacturers eventually find workarounds, I thought ATI's latest drivers were supposed to fix VIA's problems!

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[jiffy]

UT man here. I played this game on three system and it's a tough game to run, at least smooth as silk. My Asus K7V VIA chip played just OK, my Asus A7M266 DDR AMD 760 chip played the worst I seen, after 6 months got it to the point it's OK to play on, for my kid that is. My UT board now is Abit KT7A-RAID VIA chip, plays very smooth. All under Win98se. I been threw many tweaks and freezes. Bottom line it was always a setting in the BIOS. Like I said, I have three boards and only one play's it well, very well. Other's clam to play the game using Win2000 and XP, but are they a die hard UT fan, and do they even know what smooth is??? If you don't find a setting that works it could be you mother board, or WinXP, or ATI. Also this was all done with GeForces. Being an ATI card which I never had, everything I said could be vis versa. Maybe an ATI card would work on my boards that played shitty? After all is said I would say try Win98se if you have it.

defrage is child's play-fdisk

 

[Guest]

The problem isn't getting UT to play smooth as silk, it does that quite well on my old V5500, a solid 80-120fps. The Radeon was getting similar FPS with FSAA turned on, and I liked that. However, it crashed periodically. I tried all settings I could think of trying to tweak it (AGPX, Aperture size etc (tried 32,64,128).
This was on the latest version of UT of course. It ran fine in glide mode before I switched cards.. I swapped in the Radeon 8500 (after removing remnant 3dfx tools etc), and ran UT in D3D mode (and later OGL mode). UT would constantly crash, a solid hang. I've since placed my V5500 back in the system, and it hung then too. However, I neglected to remove the radeon 8500 drivers. After the drivers were removed, UT runs fine again.

The Radeon 8500 Crashed IN ALL 3D Applications. Randomly. 3dMark2001 included.. It finished one loop of the demo, began the 2nd demo run, and crashed while during the lobby scene. Seeing how the Radeon 8500 worked fine in the Intel board, and crashed in mine, then when the 3dfx card was placed back in mine it worked fine, I want to think there's a driver issue, because I know the card isn't bad. Which leaves me with 2 options.. wait for drivers that fix the problem (could take quite long knowing ATI), or return the Radeon 8500 and spring for a Ge3 Ti500. Unless someone knows when updated drivers are coming out (or have fixed the same problem somehow), I'm open to suggestions. Thanks!

 

[AMD_Man]

Updated drivers are coming one in 1-2 weeks. ATI is releasing drivers like crazy now.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[AMD_Man]

Updated drivers are coming out in 1-2 weeks. ATI is releasing drivers like crazy now.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I appreciate the info. Hopefully the new drivers will resolve this problem.

 

[Guest]

I think I've actually fixed my problem. For some reason, the combination of the Radeon 8500 + CL SB Audigy + Chipset was causing the crash.. with the V5 in there, the problem didn't rear its head, but with the Radeon, it showed up.. after disabling the Audigy (Time to go to onboard audio, good thing its 6 channel + optical), everything ran as it was supposed to, or at least appears to so far. I'll leave more messages here if it truly works or not (tested longer than 1 hour)

 

[Guest]

well i have the same thing except I am running a PIII 450 on a ABIT motherboard. I have around the same problems like you but I tried playing Ballistics(3d racing game) and ghsot recon.. nothing.. but with CS, TFC and Quake III
it's hell!!!either screen black out or hangs on the spot!I don;t know what's my problme. It's not heat because I put full blast air con into an uncovered CPU. It still hangS!!!
I took out Audigy as I suspect it to be the cause but now I tried to play and it hangs faster than ever! only 2 seconds into the game!!!!!NOOO

 

[bront]

Interesting. You might want to try a clean OS install. Perhaps you should check for updated Audigy drivers and see if they help.

What OS are you using anyway?

Chesnuts roasting on an open CPU
Bill Gates nipping at your wallet

 

[Guest]

I am using Win 98SE and I just did a clean install of OS. Updated drivers are not available for Audigy in Win 98!!

 

[Guest]

Yeah, in my case it was the audigy. However, the onboard audio, despite being 6CH/Optical style isn't up to snuff driver wise as far as I am concerned.. It looks like a turtle beach card or the new hercules sound card. The only issue I have left (a very small one) is that alt-tabbing out of a 3d app, then coming back into it sometimes produces some texture problems.. but thats a problem with the program or ATI's drivers.. either way, it's one I can live with. Thanks for all the input though everyone. As for the other person having problems, I'd reccomend just disabling everything non-essential (everything but the vid card) and see if the problem pops up.. if it does, you've got a problem with either the system or some remnant drivers. If it does run fine, then just re-enable things one by one to isolate what's causing the problem.. a time consuming process.