9800XT Problems?

RVachon · Jan 9, 2005, 11:37 PM

A buddy of mine has a weird problem. Last night he was in a middle of a Joint Op online game, and all of a sudden his framerate dropped in half, almost unplayable. So he got out, rebooted and still the same problem. He only has NASCAR Racing as another game on his system, so he tried that also with same results...FPS half of what he use to get.

His system:
P4 2.8GHz (533) on Asus P4C800 Deluxe
2x 512 MB Kingston DDR
ATI 9800XT
Enermax 350w PSU
Catalyst 4.12s

What can this be? The system itself isn't sluggish.

RVachon · Jan 10, 2005, 12:39 AM

I have more info to report: I got him to run Sisoft Sandra and his CPU is reporting only 4400 on the Drhystone but it should be in the 8000s for that 2.8. But the Whetsone score is where it should be.

I also got him to run the Memory Benchmark and that score checked out around 3300 which is about right for that setup.

So is this a CPU gone bad or something on the motherboard?

me972 · Jan 10, 2005, 02:20 AM

can't realy tell... you need to run some more test.

run 3dmark03 and aquamark03 see what they give out on CPU and GPU.
also run some diagnostics utils and check the frequencies and voltages all over the system.
also you should find and run some DOS utils that test the cpu and memory.

good luck

RVachon · Jan 10, 2005, 08:52 AM

Another thing we found out; the negative voltages are REALLY off.

-12v rail: -9.9v
-5v rail: -1.2v

All the + rails where fine. Are the neg. voltages used for anything and cood this mean the voltage regulators on the motherboard are messed up? The system is stable without BSODs, lockups or slow downs which is what is weird.