Radeon Issues

[lighty]

Hi All,

I recently upgraded my vid card to the new Ati Radeon 9700 Pro but so far i have had nothing but technical glitches. At first it was a driver issue but with updating to the latest drivers (as of about 2 weeks ago) i still have problems with system hangs playing games.

My system specs are:
Windows XP SP1
MSI K7T Turbo 2
768 MB Ram
SB Live DE 5.1
Athlon XP 1600+
1 IBM 40GB
1 Maxtor 80GB
1 DVD
1 CDRW

After purchasing the board processor and ram i noticed this board only handles 1Ghtz processors. what i would like to know is would this limitation also be causing my radeon to exhaust bandwidth on the board causing a system hang. sometimes sound effects continue to process but input is no longer responding (this has happened in NFSHP2 and was the background music).

i recently upgraded my 300 watt PSU thinking it was a voltage sag causing the problem but unless 470 watts isnt enuff i should have plenty of power to the system.

any advice is appreaciated.

Regards
Dallas

 

[marneus]

do you mean that your 1600+ is coming up as a 1ghz CPU now ???
if so, check your bios bus settings...

no-one shouts louder than someone who is being ignored, or in the case of techies, to be heard over the noise of their PC's ;-)

 

[lighty]

hi,

i think i have looked at the bus speeds. the only thing remotely looking like affecting cpu settings in terms of bus speeds is the ram bus speeds (as far as i can see on the bios screen) i have had a friend come out to look at it and we even did i bios update which didnt seem to help. the bios detects the processor as 1050 mhtz and i remember reading somplace that this board only takes up to 1 gig processors (as opposed to the 1.8 claimed in the manual) i tried to verify by checking MSI's website but it seems that it is either experiencing heavy load or technical difficulties (none of their links worked before a timeout occured)

i have experienced troubles with this board before, my old video card refused to function correctly unless i updated the via 4 in 1 chipset drivers which seemed to remedy that problem.

i have plans to ditch the board completely and move to asus, however that is a while down the track due to monetary restraints. i was just looking for a temporary quick fix so i can play the occasional game during my upcoming holidays.

Regards
Dallas

 

[warnerwh]

I'm running the same MSI board as you and am running an 1800+ and just downloaded the latest bios which supports upto 2600+. Just got the K7t Turbo 2 3 weeks ago and have overclocked it to 2100 which the bios recognized although stability was gone (probably my fault). Try MSI's website again. I've been there a couple times to download and have had no problem. Good Luck

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by warnerwh on 12/03/02 11:36 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[marneus]

Flash the bios with the latest one, install the latest via 4in1s & make sure your bus settings are set to 133fsb


no-one shouts louder than someone who is being ignored, or in the case of techies, to be heard over the noise of their PC's ;-)

 

[lighty]

hi,

i flashed the bios and updated the via 4 in 1 again, however this didnt change the cpu to the correct setting until i found the cpu fsb jumper in the board manual. i set this to 133 fsb and it picked up the cpu properly.

as for my radeon problems i tried a download of the latest catalyst drivers on ati's web site and it seems to be running more stable than it was. i managed to drive thru a full race in NFSHP2 which i have only been able to do once with this card (a system hang occured during the second race however) so even tho it seemed to work so far only time will tell.

i also discovered just recently that my tv tuner doesnt support many ati cards which at this stage includes the radeon 9700 pro. could this be possibly be causing system hangs during gameplay? i am going to try to remove the tv tuner for a few days if the hangs are going to persist to verify if it is a confliction between graphics card and tuner. i am also going to inform the manufacturer and ask for a possible update to their software.

Cheers for all your help. i got at least one thing working properly in my system that has been bugging me for 12 mnths. that being the board using all 1.4 gig of my athlon =)

Regards
Dallas

 

[marneus]

I would say if you is getting an issue that no software patches can fix, pull out all your cards & reinstall them on by one (fit card, boot & install... test it to make sure then power off & put the next one in etc...), when you get problems the card you just fitted is the culprit...

no-one shouts louder than someone who is being ignored, or in the case of techies, to be heard over the noise of their PC's ;-)