9600xt - problems w/ BF2, COD2, NFS:MW etc

ChrisTaco · May 16, 2006, 02:33 AM

First off let me give the specs of my pc.

Asus A8V w/ AMD 64 3200+
Sapphire 9600xt AGP
Mushkin 768MB Basic RAM (512 + 256)
Latest Omega drivers

Now the issue I've been having is this. I bought the CPU and the mb about 4 months ago. At that time I completely formatted my HD and reinstalled XP, put the latest Omega drivers (at the time) etc etc.

Now I had originally installed FEAR, COD2, and NFS:MW before I bought the new mb and CPU and everything worked fine. After the reinstall and new hardware I began to get some iffy crashes. FEAR works fine so we'll ignore this for now, COD2 is picky but it'll work for hours sometimes and sometimes not, but NFS:MW, and BF2 give me crashes almost everytime I play them. In COD2 the crashes were never at a specific time, but usually w/in 20min of playing MP. If it was SP usually longer. NFS:MW it was usually 2-3min within driving. BF2 seems to be w/in 5 minutes. I thought it was a heat issue but no, my case is sufficiently cool (same w/ the vid card and CPU). My PS is a 430w Antec. My 12v rail shows 11.3v consistantly (doesn't seem too low to be a problem).

As for the crashes in the games, what tends to happen in COD2 and NFS is the screen would turn black, my monitor would act like there isn't a signal to it, and then the computer would reboot. Upon getting into windows I would get an error: 100000ea which seems to be: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER. I've heard it could be driver or a fault hardware issue. So I installed the latest Omega drivers as of tonight, and even the latest ATI drivers and had the same problem. In BF2 I'll start a level in SP and within 5 minutes it'll freeze, the screen will turn black (but I'll still hear in game music), I can alt-tab back to windows to end the process, and then my desktop is slow so I have to reboot. BTW doing typical things like surfing the net, office work, etc there are no vid problems.

Does this sound like my 9600xt is going bad/already bad? How can I test the vid card to determine if it really is bad? I don't see any artifacts in any of the games, and most of the time I run the games in 800x600 so I can get better FPS and texture quality. What can I do?

If I'm forced to upgrade to a new card, I don't want to spend the $ on a geforce 7 series or ATI X1xxx card since I'll be building my own personal computer within a few months. I'd rather buy a geforce 6 and softmod it (or something similar) . So can someone recommend something? And would my PS be sufficient enough to handle the new card? Thanks for any help.

Yousaif · May 16, 2006, 04:49 AM

Quote:

My 12v rail shows 11.3v consistantly (doesn't seem too low to be a problem).

I would be a tad worried about that with a new card.

I just recently upgraded from a 9600XT to an X1600PRO, which I paid only $139.00 for. The price dropped $10 the next week, but I don't know how available they are.

Wow looks like they have dropped to $119.00 before shipping: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102665

Up to you but if you need to upgrade and are stuck with an AGP for a bit longer then you really can do much worse.

ChrisTaco · May 16, 2006, 12:22 PM

Hmmm...it seems the little fan/hs combo that's on the GPU has given up. The fan won't spin and by hand its kinda tight. Guess the bearings are shot in it. I'm guessing it's heating up in games and won't cool enough, so it reboots. Anyone know where I can get a replacement fan?