baba^

Hi,

Since last night my X1900XT has been acting very strange. When playing CSS, the game stutters as if I am overclocking my card and the temps are waytoo high. This is not the case, I have even underclocked the card in order to try to fix this issue. Any other game I play will last around 10 minutes until totally freezing up the system (VPU recover on or off, no difference).

It all started last night when I decided to come back to XP from Vista. The system installed perfectly, drivers and all, and I immediately installed ATI Tray Tools and fiddled with clocks. i forgot to up the voltage when increasing the clock, and the system hung. No VPU recover, so i rebooted. The system then refused to boot.

After around 2 hours of swapping everything but the CPU (I swapped the PCIe slot of the card, but don't have a spare PCIe card available) the system booted and reported a corrupt CMOS. So I flashed it using the Asus bootable CD. Upon reboot I got the same error, and read somewhere that someone else had the same BIOS issue with the motherboard. The thread i read (can't recall where I read it) was a user having issues just like me, with the same motherboard and GPU, and even went as far as to RMA his components, without success.. I followed instructions to use slot B1 with 1 DIMM. This worked, and I got back to Windows.

However, that's when the stuttering and crashing started. Working in 2D is fine. Even Crytek's Sandbox works fine. But more than 5 minutes in any full screen 3D app and I get a lockup. I even tried Folding@Home to make sure it really was the GPU, and a crash after a short while of running the app in the background confirmed this. I also stress tested the rest of my system without a crash. I have also reflashed my card with the BIOS of another X1900XT, but no fix there either.

The GPU temp is fine, less than 60 when I underclock the card. I still get way over 100FPS in CSS, but even with the low temps the game is unplayable.

The only thing I can think of is that either: the card's BIOS is causing VPU recovery at much lower temps than it should (but I have flashed the BIOS so unlkely); the HSF has lost proper contact with the GPU/DIMMS and the temperatures reported are way lower than actual temps (but the card is not at all hot to the touch); it's my motherboard.

I'm at a loss peeps, but if anyone has had a similar experience or have any ideas please let me know.

To sum up I have:

Tried various memory configs
Tried various clocks for the GPU
Tried various BIOS settings
Reset mobo BIOS
Reflashed mobo BIOS
Reflashed GPU
Stripped and rebuilts system with current components
Tried various sound card configs
NO SPARE GPU
NO SPARE MOBO
NO SPARE CPU

Juggernaut

Tried reinstalling drivers already? Try the latest catalysts.
Darn I posted this 3 times now, this guide is really good:
http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/569/...ide/index.html

Just to make shure it isnt a driver problem

baba^

Fixed the problem.

Turns out the following were wrong:

Mobo BIOS was 0110 or something stupidly early (compared to rev 0502 current), and must've been incompatible with the X1900XT;
ATI card was fine, as the temps suggested;
One of my Ballistix DIMMS was causing the BIOS to think it was corrupt :S now down to a single 1GB DIMM ;

Up and running again, running my two 512MB OCZ Gamer PC300 at lower latencies than the Ballistix. Can definitely notice the loss of RAM though. Bang goes my idea of getting a master card this Christmas, looks like RAM is on the menu, again.