9700pro woes, heat maybe?

Aretè

In my endless battle with my nefarious 9700pro, the old problems that i had made posts about had seemingly been stomped out by a full system reformat, upgrade of bios/chipset.

Lo and behold not everything that glitters is gold. Same old problems has been rearing its head lately, seriously outta nowhere. Its been running fine since i took care of everything a month or two back. Now when i say this is out of nowhere i say this is out of nowhere, because i had been running all my games fine, City of heroes, command and conquer generals, lineage 2, battlefield vietnam. Now all of them suffer problems, well my video card suffers from problems when i run it. I was runnin reg cats 4.3 fine and la la la outta nowhere shit begins falling apart so im like whatever, update to 4.4, same thing, okay watever omegas 4.4s once with FW on and one with FA off. Bleh nothing. So im at a loss cuz nothing new has been installed into my computer nor any updates made that could of possibly made some conflicts. So i decide to pop it open and see whats going on in the innards and the card i know is known to run warm, but it felt kinda little warm touch, while everythign else in the case was relatively cool, Hdds, soundscards, etc. Before shutting down the comp i launched my asusprobe and mobo temp was at 75f and cpu was 85f. So vid card was only shit that was hot.

So this is what happens when the card farts out. Ill be playing a game and ish and then screen freezes and the sound loops, it doesnt crackle pop or anythign just loops, then screen flicker stutters, flickers, goes black, sound cuts out then goes back to normal, vpu recovery screen pops up and depending on how bad the crash i either restart because i am in software rendering mode or i just quit out the game and restart the game. There were a few instances that the card messed out without me even playing a game. I was doing some homework on the comp for a class and the screen freezes (no music or nething was playing just had up word and a few googled pages) then gets really effen messed up, goes black, flickers comes back screen flutters, has boxes all over the place clears out then vpu recover comes up and tells me my video card just messed up (no shit). So im at a loss, kinda tired of fighting with these video cards, iv prob sent bout 3 back now (nah it isnt my mobo, iv tested them on other comps endlessy, after my 1st return i ran tests on other comps and they returned same problems) so im getting a lil frustrated but whatever ill figure it out or snap the card in the process, whichever comes first.

i guess ill post system specs, but i mainly just wanna know if neone thinks what i have is a problem related to heat, though my comp sounds like an apache helicopter cuz i have 5 6000rpm fans runnin full tilt on a 550w tru power antec psu

everything else:

asus P4C800-E Deluxe latest bio/chipset update
microsoft xp all crit updates
corsair xms 3200
(made by) ati 9700pro 128 (its the devil)

ne other info u guys want to help u diagnoise my bullish just let me know, imma be banging my head against a wall in the meantime.

Roadee

if you dont mind......list EVERYTHING that you have hooked into the computer....drives, USB devices and all.......also what kind of fans are they......as in who makes them. Are you overclocking at all? How many outlets are in the room....what is plugged into them......things like that. I am looking for something that is similiar in occurence for each time this happens.

SJae

It sounds like you're doing something wrong when installing your videocard. If you had 3 different cards sent back to you and all of them flaked out, there's a good chance it's your mishandling of the card rather than the card themselves.

Did you remember to discharge any static electricity before touching your cards? Are you holding the card correctly?

Also, if you're OC'ing, you should stop--and read how to OC better on web sites.

Judas

take this one very seriously.... you wouldn't beleive what could be just somehow foweling up a system.... i would say something got corrupted... or some kinda of spike in power could have messed it up..... as you appear to have worked out everything else and it was just sudden.. (any lightning storms in your area? )

Brown outs are terrible.... if i had the power.. i would make everyone i sold a computer to... buy an APC UPS bar...... they are extremely cheap now and can even diagnose some household problems (such as a stable GROUND)..... $40 canadian will get you something that'll give you about 15 minutes of backup time.... which is more then enough if you have a black out and save and shutdown...... apc UPS devices will automatically prepare for spikes in power... noise... and clean your power..... Without it.... i had experienced problems that i thought i was doing something wrong....

Also reason i lost a long time ago... compaq computer... (completely fried)

Aretè

Roadee - ill get back to you on that after work, i live in a dorm on campus, and then when at home i do have a less connections but these problems were occuring whether at home or campus, but ill list everything later.

Sjae - i appreciate the help but i am not an idiot when it comes to installing computer parts, it isnt the first one i have installed, and yes i am always grounded when installing these cards, remeber what i said in the post. THIS time the problem came back out of nowhwere, i was running ALL games and everything in general very well, until two days ago when this problem suddenly started happening. Nothing in my computer is over clocked everything is running stock speeds. The card itself has its own psu line, nothing else is plugged in.

Thats it for now, i gotta head for work but when i come back ill look into ur suggestion roadee a lil more and list everything.

Roadee

I am getting ready to take off for a couple of hours.....I will check in on it when I get back. I have a few ideas and will try to see if we can figure this out.

BWX

I would try unhooking all but the necessary fans (the CPU fan etc...) and take out all but one mem stick.
Unhook all but one optical drive.

Open the case (side doors off) so it doesn't get hot, and put the 9700 pro on it's own molex lead, and see if it acts any better.

If it does work better it's your PSU probably, or too many things hooked up to one lead or something...
Do all this as a last resort, because it's a pain- but you can solve problems this way by running bare minimum and if it behaves differently after doing this you know something is up....