HELP! - 8500DV Serious Problem

[Guest]

My AIW 8500DV Card will not run any kind of openGL game. After anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes the whole system locks with either vertical colored lines or squiggly colored blocks fillling the screen. The only way to get out of this is to hit reset. This happens in Half-life, Quake3, and Serious Sam (which is all I have tried). 2D Games and other 2D apps work fine.

Here is what I have tried:
1. Installed the latest BIOS for my motherboard
2. Installed the latest drivers for the ATI card
3. Installed the latest VIA 4in1 chipset drivers
4. Installed the latest patches for all the games (including the ATI patch for half-life)
5. Pulled all the other PCI cards and did a clean install of windows XP
6. Called ATI Tech support which had me BIOS tweak until my fingers were bloody and I was stark raving MAD! BIOS tweaks included:
- AGP 2x and 4x
- AGP Apature Size = 32mb and 64mb
- C8000-CBFFFF Shadow and CC000-CFFFF shadow = ENABLED
- Video BIOS shadowing = DISABLED
- Init Primary Display = AGP
- AGP Fast Writes = DISABLED
- PnP OS = YES
- Many others I do not remember
7. Installed the Beta drivers for the ATI card
8. Flashed back to a previous BIOS (I was getting desperate)
9. Pulled ATI and tried my GeForce256 in system (Worked perfectly)
10. Disabled USB (shared the IRQ with the ATI card)
11. Re-Installed the AMD 761 Northbridge drivers over the Windows XP provided drivers even though they are the same version (Still desperate)
12. Updated Windows XP with everything MS had to offer
13. Scoured internet for hours on end (moving into days on end) looking for a solution. Including the rage3d.com boards which seem to be down tonight.

The only thing that has solved the problem is to down clock (thats right DOWN CLOCK) my FSB to 100 which turns my XP1900 into an XP1600. This solved the problem, but is not a work-around that is viable to me. I bought an XP1900 because it is a 1900!

My system configs are below:
ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV
Abit KG7 (VIA southbridge and AMD 761 northbridge)
AMD XP1900
2 x Micron 256mb PC2100 DDR
2 x Samsung 40gb HDD
Plenty of Cooling
Plenty of Power
Windows XP professional

PLEASE HELP!
Thanks,

Cavalier

 

[Guest]

Based on your quest there are a few things that could have to do with the problem:
- ATI recommends a agp aperture of 128MB
- The VIA 4in1 chipset drivers are known to cause problems with a Radeon (read the postings). Don't know if this ever has been resolved.
- Previous detonator drivers are also known to cause problems.

Maybe it's an idea to try if the card works with a new installation of XP next to the current installation. If that also fails, I'd send it back to the supplier.

Gr, Anc

 

[jkadesjo]

Hi!
I wrote this in an other thread.
Someone thougt that 300W isn´t enough.
--------------------------------------
Hi!
This is for all of you who have problems with ATI Radeon 8500 on an AMD Athlon XP platform. As me you probably were astonished by the benchmarks on THGs website. But if you look closely they have all been performed on a Pentium 4 platform…
I have read the posts in this forum to see if anyone has the same problems with ATI Radeon 8500 that I have. And I have seen that many of you do. I have read some reviews and have learned that Radeon 8500 has compatibility problems with AMD Athlon XP processors. The problem is that when ATI Radeon 8500 runs DircectX 8 application the whole system freezes and attempts to reboot. Sometime the systems successfully reboots and sometimes it just freezes and has to be rebooted manually. The system freeze occurs after some seconds in some cases and after some minutes in other cases.

I have read that some people solved this problem by setting the AGP rate 2X instead of 4X in BIOS. Some people solved it by disabling AGP Fast Writes in BIOS. None of this worked for me; I still get the system freeze after a while of running DirectX applications. Sometimes I get this same error when I run DirectX 7 applications but it doesn’t happen as often with DirectX 8 applications.

Anyway… I have found a way to solve the problem for my system and it’s by “under clocking” my system. Yes you heard me right. When I set my FSB to 100 Mhz instead of 133 Mhz the problem is solved. This makes my Athlon XP 1800+ witch normally runs at 1533 Mhz to run at 1150 Mhz or something like that.

I use the latest drivers from ATIs website (6.13.10.6015). Other people had this problem several months ago and solved it by installing the newest drivers. This however didn’t work for me. I finally was able to test my Radeon 8500 in 3DMark 2001 after lowering the FSB to 100 Mhz. Before I did this my system froze before the 3DMark 2001 benchmark was finished.

If any one knows a way to solve the problem without me having to under clock my system I would be greatly thankful.

This was a quite long post. I hope you survived the reading.


This link describes the problem.
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/ati/8500/index4.html look under “Our Experiences:” halfway down the page.

My system:
Athlon XP 1800+
ATI Radeon 8500, 64 Mb
EPoX 8KHA+
Samsung 256 Mb, PC2100/266
Q Technology 300W

I may have to little cooling for my processor. It runs at a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.