[Urbansprawl]

Okay long story: in July I upgraded my PC to its current spec. Since then I have ironed out all the bugs I came across except for one. During gaming, my PC would sometimes freeze after about 15 minutes. All action of the screen would cease, and the cursor would soon freeze as well. First up, here are my specs:

Athlon 64 3400+ (Newcastle)
Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP (Latest BIOS)
1 x 512mb Corsair Value @ spd occupying slot 0.
Enermax 350watt PSU
Powercolor 9800pro --> 9800xt
SB Live! Value
Pioneer 106s DVD
Asus 52x24x52 CDRW
System disk:
WD400BB 40gb 7200 rpm HD.
Archive Disks:
WD600BB 60gb 7200 rpm HD.
WD1200JB 120gb 7200 rpm HD.

Software: WinXP Pro Sp2.
2.590 Omega's (Latest)
Nforce 5.10 (Latest)
Directx 9.0c

It is worth noting that sometimes (30%) this freeze will not occur. If it is going to freeze, however, it will almost always do it in the first 15 minutes. Also, only when rendering 3d frames does the card become susceptible to freezing. For example, the strategy map in Medieval Total War does not freeze. But even if a game is rendering a background of a menu ie. C&C Generals or DoW, it is likely to freeze after a while. Load does not seem to affect the likelihood of a freeze. The freezes also occur in Open GL games, ie HL or Doom3.

Things I have tried to no avail:

Every ATI driver I could lay my hands on

No SP, SP1, SP1a, SP2

Most BIOS revisions of this mobo

ATI Silencer 1 on the 9800 pro.

Different molex plugs on the card (ie dedicated, split, shared with CDRW etc)

The 9800XT BIOS flash was only performed last night. The freezes continued as before.

Haven't tried yet:

System Reinstall

Moving RAM around

Any other video cards

Things I have tried to some avail:

My first suspicion was an overheating card, so I experimented with underclocking the core/mem on the video card. At first this met with success, but later the freezes continued. Underclocking seems to reduce the probability of a freeze, but not eliminate it. This is true pre and post BIOS flash. This leads me to suspect two possible culprits:

1.I still do not have sufficient cooling.
2.The card is not receiving enough power. Speedfan reports the following voltages:

Vcore1: 1.52v
Vcore2: 2.59v
+3.3V: 3.38v
+5V: 3.76v
+12V: 12.29v
-12V: -7.0v
-5V: -1.61v
+5V: 4.29v (reports twice for some reason)
Vbat: 4.08v

I'm pretty out of my depth on voltages, do these mean anything to anyone? Any help and suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks.

[Chump]

I suggest getting a Windows 64-bit operating system to use with your processor.

[WarFlail]

Firstly, I think this thread should be moved to its correct forum.

Unfortunately, Urbansprawl, yours is a very common problem and it isn't limited to the 9800 Pro or your particular motherboard. I have a 9700 Pro and a venerable Granite Bay m/b, and the same thing happens for me (and has been happening for the 2 years I've had this rig). Over the past couple of years I've heard of this happening with nVidia cards so it isn't limited only to Radeons.

Recently, I thought my woes were finally over when I installed Catalyst 4.9. Then I made the foolish mistake of installing 3DMark05, which gave me benchmark scores below 1000. After that, the visual quality in Doom 3 started to degrade - I started seeing flickering black spots on textures, something I hadn't seen before (white sparkly spots, yes, but not black ones). I tried Omega's drivers based on the 4.10 betas and the framerate and visual quality in Doom 3 improved dramatically... However, the crashes started occurring again.

I've performed a thorough clean out of the ATI drivers using Genius's n00b guide and Driver Cleaner 3.0, and installed 4.9 again. Unfortunately, the problem is still there - 3D games hang (freeze) within the first 15 minutes or so of gaming. If I run a Timedemo in Doom 3, it always runs fine on the first run, but it is guaranteed to hang during the second.

I used to be able to work around my problem by reducing the AGP transfer rate to 4X and disabling AGP fast write. However I am no longer convinced that these solutions work for me anymore.

I've tried making changes to the motherboard's BIOS settings, you know, things like disabling delayed transaction and changing the AGP aperture size. But none of this meddling has made the slightest bit of difference.

I really regret having installed 3DMark05 (it's gone now) and having changed to a different graphics driver. One thing I must keep reminding myself is "if it ain't fixed, don't mess with it!"

-=W=-