ksporry

...and a lot of money by teh sounds of it...
thanks for the advice. I think I'll be upgrading my PSU with the rest one of these days...

Just one note: wattage and current are directly related. It' s voltage that tend to stay the same (unless you start tweaking and over/underclocking of course...), meaning wattage goes up when current draw goes up. So replacing my 420W PSU for a 600W PSU will be one of the first actions I'll take.

ksporry

Hi Guys,

I plugged my graphics card into my old machine, and indeed...it did not work anymore. It's dead as a rat... Thanks Microsoft! Oh, well, I guess I can save myself some money by selling off Vista, and using the money to finance my new graphics card... By the way, the 420Watt PSU can deliver 36A on the red channels (which I guess powers the graphics card and 2 HDDs. I think I'll pop over to my local PC shop. their prices are not much higher than the internet, so hopefully I can get a good deal. I need to do shopping as well so I might visit some PC shops at Bristol too. Just for price comparison.

CATALYSTCATCHER

One the one hand it is good that you finally have a component that has failed outright. Intermittent problems with no obvious cause are extremely frustrating. A bad component tends to focus the next troubleshooting move on replacing the part. However it sucks from the financial perspective. But it is generally far less frustrating in the long term.

I suggest you take the opportunity (assuming your dealer has a decent return policy) to maintain a focus on the troubleshooting. What I mean is ........of course you will replace the graphics card, but then do your best/worst to ensure the "not responding issue" has been resolved. If it recurs, then return the graphics card once to be 99.9 % certain that you did not get another bad card.

If possible try to RMA your bad card so you can try out the replacement to determine if the issue was related to failing graphics hardware or the drivers in general.

I went back over the thread and I believe you are running an NV graphics card. But I am not absolutly certain. Regardless which way you go with your choice of new graphics be sure to torture test early to ensure the "not responding issue" is gone. (Rely on that return policy to assist you thru the recovery process) In my experience with PCs and unpredictably occuring problems you must get about a week of stable run time before you can start to feel comfortable that you have reached a solution.

One final comment.......if you do switch brands and the problem is resolved don't assume that it is the brand that is bad. A single bad card on either side can leave a bad taste in your mouth, but is no real indicator of who is great or who sucks. Believe me when I say it is not in the best interest of any company to knowingly ship bad product.

In any case let us know how things work out. And also if anything interesting we can add to our experience, crops up in the process.

CC

ksporry

Hi Guys,

This may sound stupid, butehh... I bought a Saphire 2600XT just now. Installed it and... nothing...
No image on my screen whatsoever.
Having said that. The card has got 2 DVI ports. I'm using a DVI-vga adapter to connect my monitor as it only has a VGA connector. Is it possible that I just can't use DVI-VGA adapters to get a DVI signal to a VGA monitor?

Kizo

Hi,
I too have a monitor (15inch LCD) with only VGA connector and haven't had any problem with my Sapphire card.
I would suggest that you try another DVI->VGA adapter (Sapphire offers 2 bundled if you have GDDR4 version, or you could borrow one if you can), and try the other DVI connector. Also if the problem persists, it's best for you to try your card in another system, and also try another card in your system and see if everything works correctly. Lastly, you can check the monitor and see if its damaged in any way. Thats the best way to eliminate all the possibilities for hardware damages to your system or your GFX.
If the problem is in the GFX, you should RMA it.

BTW, I think this should have been posted in a separate thread.

CATALYSTCATCHER

Try the other DVI port. The DVII connections actually have both the digital signals and also analog signals to. The adapter simply presents the analog signals to a VGA stle plug so you can connect it. It would seem that you are having a very unlucky time at the moment. But don't do anything rash. Simply re-install/reseat the new card , verify ALL the connections look ok and try it again. Try both ports. Try a different adapter as suggested above.

If no joy, perhaps you can return to the store and test the card there or exchange it as an out of box failure. (Rare but it happens) It is best if they can verify that the card is working rather than a blind exchange, but whatever.

Does the system seem to be powering up and launching into windows? Or is everything simply dead?

Refresh my memory, is the card AGP or PCIE?

If your mobo has 2 PCIE slots try the other one.

I feel your pain. It should not be this difficult

ksporry

It was more stupid than I thought...
Turns out the ATX 4 pin power connector was not connected...
ANyway, the guys sold me a "branded" power supply of 450Watts (jeantech). Turns out the nominal power is 425W, barely 5Watt more than my current one. Not only that, after a few hours of nominal running, it overheated and shut down my PC. SO I'll be returning that one, and get a cheap generic 600 watt PSU for half the price...

I got the PC running on XP though, and it seems to be doing well!
I don't plan to us Vista anymore, after what happened to my older card. But I do think this justifies som elegal action, if it indeed turns out Vissta drove my graphics card to the breaking point.

CATALYSTCATCHER

Ahh, so your luck is not quite so bad. Just the excitement of a new card and a hasty install. :-) I think we have all had similar events occur. I know I have.

So a little progress. I also find it interesting that you say the new PSU overheated and shut down. You now have a pretty good idea of roughly how many watts are being used thy all the stuff in the system. It also means your old PSU was also close to its limit as well. More likely a marginal PSU did damage than the OS

Just use the automotive analogy. Which runs better and last longer? The little engine that must run at the max all the time or the big engine that idles along and has power to spare when it is called for.
(Sorry, I know, I am getting old and have lots of grandpa style stories.............When I was young, we used to live in shoe box, in middle of street :- )

The reality is that you will never likely succeed with a legal action. There are not enough examples of failing hardware in Vista to come close to something like the laptop battery recall, where numerous "burst into flames" events occured. Even there the recall notices prevented any sort of successful suit. Besides you would be going against organizations with billions which means they can afford to drag it out.

Vista does push the graphics a little harder than XP, but not significantly.

Hope the new PSU solves your problems.

GeorgeP

OK, I´m new in here and my English is as bad as possible, so I won´t torture others with too many words.
As I see the discussion in this Forum is slighltly shiftig itself away from the "display driver atikmdag stopped....blah blah" so I try to bring it back with my sad life story .
My problem is very similar to The Wraiths one. Config: OS: W Vista Home Premium, new Gigabyte MoBo(chipset P35), 1GB RAM, Core 2 Duo 2.13, Radeon 1950 Pro Ultimate (Driver Catalyst 7.4-7.8) all is brand new.
After starting any game - time from start to crash depends mostly on graphic demands of the game. (resolution, effects AA and so on) - picture on screen fall apart and than 2 scenarios are possible: game ends and in Windovs I see ...atikmdag... error, or PC just reboots.
At the time there is apparently no soution to this problem - so I see 2. posibilities:

1. What if I´ll install Catalyst 7.1 that didn´t suffered this problem and wait until the
solution comes - or it is bad idea and I´ll cause myself even more troubles with the
old driver ???

2. To hell with Vista and I go back to old good XP.....

CATALYSTCATCHER

Does the 1950PRO overheat? What is the temperature on the GPU at idle? What is the temperature when the game is running?

Make sure you not overclocking any part in the system and see if that helps.

If you install an older driver and the problem stops I would be interested to know.

As I have tried to explain to many others, the "kmd stopped responding" message is not an error. It is windows telling the user that an unknown problem occurred and the GPU has been restarted. It could be a driver problem but it is far more likely a hardware issue.

If there is a hardware problem then it will still be there in XP although it may not show up in the same manner.

Thanks

CC

BTW: Your English seems pretty good to me.

GeorgeP

Hi CC,
thank you very much for reply. I have Sapphire Ultimate Radeon 1950 Pro with Zalman heatpipe GPU cooler(stock): ULTIMATE ATI RADEONâ„¢ X1950 PRO The card is (has been?) slightly overclocked by manufacturer, and I´m not kind of a overclocker :-). Also CPU and RAM are running on factory settings. The GPU temperature by crash is mostly about 40 degrees of C (according to Catalyst Control Center) - at idle it is 36-37.

I read your responses in atikmdag error thread so i know, that U posted before that the error is not directly related to a driver. But why so many other users with different hardware constellation have the same problem (atikmdag error)? The only common thing is Win Vista and ATI card with ATI drivers. So I thing its just a combination of ATI driver and W Vista(and lack of interest on the part of ATI and MS to solve this particular problem)
Iĺl try to instal the Catalyst 7.1 (but somewhere I read that instead of atikmdag error I´ll just get R300 error instead.) So I´ll see

CATALYSTCATCHER

With those temperatures I don't believe you have a heat problem. In fact they are quite low for any 19xx product.

The message R300 or ATIkmd, is simply Vista telling you that it has restarted this driver. Vista will restart the driver if the driver is busy for more than 2 seconds.

Yes a bad driver can cause the problem, but so can bad hardware and there are no clues as to why the graphics driver was busy for longer than 2 seconds. Please remember that even the driver actually loads into memory on the graphics card and passes data between system and graphics memory. Which means that bad memory can actually make the driver fail.

A real driver bug will be fairly easy to duplicate. becasue it is precictable.

Hardware issues tend to occur more randomly.

Can you please tell me more details about the other parts of your system. Motherboard, CPU, system memory, PSU, etc, etc.

It seems in the NV world that many people are experincing better results (less TDR) when they change the system memory. Either they use standard clocks or less memory. I know that is not a solution but it is an important clue.

Thanks

BTW: we have engineers assigned to deal with these issues, as does MS, however, the TDR issues are proving difficult to unravel.

GeorgeP

Ok, first news.... downgrade to Catalyst 7.1 unsucssesfull. May be because of incomplete uninstal (just driver and CCC instead of complete uninstal of all ATI components).
At least my problem is not random - regulary after starting any game ( at the momemnt CaC Tiberium Wars and Just Cause, 4 testing purposes) I can just wait when te picture changes to flickering pixels (5-10min. of playng). In Just Cause than PC simply reboots without BSoD,
In Tiberium Wars I got either atikmdag error (if I´m quick enough and hit the Win button - and I can than maximize the game and play as nothing happened), Or If I try to stay in game and make 4 example gamesave - than also reeboot.
My PC config MoBo Gigabyte GA-P35 DS3, CPU Intel Core 2 Duo 2,33 MHz E6550. RAM Kingston DDR II 800Mhz 1024MB, HDD Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA II, PSU: Fortron 450W. And W. Vista of course. The other option would to give my GK to my brothers PC (XP based) and try how ist the graphic card behavior in games with W. XP.

CATALYSTCATCHER

Even though you have a specific scenario that leads to the crash, it would still be considered random because it take a few minutes before it occurs. If the crash occured alway on the same screen or always as the game started then it would not be random and more likely a graphics driver bug or game bug.

Have you considered that something other than the graphics card may be the source of the problem? Particularly for spontaneous system reboots. The display corruption could easily be caused by a failing PSU.

The previous poster (ksporry) had a similar wattage PSU and it seems the PSU was dying a slow death and eventually failed possibly also damaging the graphics card.

Have you considered an RMA for the graphics card? or trying it in a different system? Trying the graphics card in XP might be useful, but may not prove anything conclusive.

GeorgeP

OK U are right - it could be called a random thing because of various time from the start to crash of apliccation.
But the different time period can also be caused 4 example by different starting temperature of GPU at the start of aplicattion (I´d never had nerves to try a precise sequence of operations followed by starting the game and parallel time measurement - may be I would realize that the time to crash is always the same) (I´m talking about The Wraith´s theory about driver´s attempt to increase GPU-cooler speed followed by crash - proof: with 100% cooler speed with ATI tools the game stays stable) .
U may be right with GPU corruption or PSU but both of them are new pieces ( I know, that argument "its new" means nothing significant)
Yesterday I did a clean install of Win XP and Catalyst 7.8 and I can say "preliminary" that I was able to play the "Just cause" without problems with even higher res. and details for twice as long time as in Vista, without any problem (than I went to bed :-)) So future will show if it stays so (I cross fingers). If, than it would be at least partial proof, that it handles about software and not hardware fault.
But I´m still convinced, that the "atikmdag stopped respondig" error is simply caused by unsolved problem between W. Vista and ATI Catalyst.

CATALYSTCATCHER

Unfortunately all our internal testing of fan speed control with 19xx series indicates that the driver does adjust the speed without a TDR error. And admittedly the 19xx series runs pretty hot and close to the limit. Your Saphire model has an excellent cooling solution so your temps on the GPU are quite a bit lower than most.

It is true that forcing the fan to 100% and preventing the overheat condition prevents the problem. as does using an external fan to cool the GPU. So overheating is definately the actual cause of the TDR. If the temperature on the GPU gets to it's absolute maximum limit then the hardware actually forces a restart of the GPU.

It would be interesting to know if ATItool will actually allow Wraith to ramp the fan speed rather than simply forcing 100%. I have done both using ATItool and it does work fine. (For me:-) I understand this user is having a problem but we can't reproduce it.

Bottom line for us is that usually we need to reproduce an issue exactly before we can debug the code to determine where things are going wrong.
Sometimes we find bugs in the software, but sometimes we find problems related to the specific system hardware combination.

ksporry

Well, got the 600 Watt PSU, and it doesn't even get WARM! And that for half the price of that "branded" piece of crap...! I guess they were hoping I would burn out my MoBo and Gr. Card etc, and come back for a complete PC. Fat chance!
Anyway, am running FSX with everything roughly medium, and it is smooth as a baby's bottom! Love my new 2600XT running smoothly on XP, heheh. Now to sell my Vista disk. It will finance a flight yoke from Saitek for me...

GeorgeP

Hi CC,
now I think U´ll be pleased :-) (and I dissapointed).
So after a little bit of testing I can say - in my fault nothing changes with Win XP and drivers of any kind - picture corruption in game or PC restarts remains only this error became more random than in Vista (sometimes I´m able 2 play it barely 5min, sometimes 30min.) but the end always the same. It seems to, there is no relation to GPU temp. and its really a hardware conflict (as U told from the start on) I´ll check the CPU temp, RAM seems (according to MEMtest) OK, Iĺl try aply? RMA on my GC and than Iĺl see. What could it be? CPU?, MoBo?, PSU? Or just a bad combination of good hardware? I´m really starting to be desperate. Brand new PC and not working,....... OK, this is i life - Murphy´s law in practice.
OK so much at the time to "driver problem". Thanks 4 help anyway and take care.

CATALYSTCATCHER

What games are you running? Are you playing online or single player? Do you also have a 3rd party tweaker installed?

I know the feeling, when a pc is not quite right but you are getting no clues to help you decide what is next. ........It sucks.

GeorgeP

I´m running only 2 now Just Cause - from Eidos - it´s bundle to Graphic Card from Sapphire. The next one is Real Time Strategy CC Tiberium Wars. I´m playing only single player and have no 3d party tweaker installed and any piece of HW is´nt and was´nt overclocked or tweaked. In both games I´m experiencig the same problem (described in previous threads) I tried fresh clean install of Vista incl. all updates and the same I did with Win. XP - new clean install of XP SP 2 with newest actualizations. Different versions of Catalysts - from 7.1 to 7.8.

CATALYSTCATCHER

That is very promising news indeed, but give it a few weeks before you have a celebration party. The true source of the problem may still be lurking in the system. Therefore, I would not advise changing/updating any drivers until you are very confident that the issue has been resolved. (A couple of weeks anyway. and yes I am the suspicious , paranoid type when it comes to troubleshooting problems. Unless, of course, you are 100% certain you know the root cause of the problem)

From my perspective, the fact that the system is working much better tells me that the drivers, graphics or otherwise, are OK. A driver does not spontaneously mutate from being OK to having bugs.

I hope the PSU has resolved your difficulties.

Happy gaming!

CC

BTW: You may find this an intriguing read. (Note the comments added to the first post by unwinder) RivaTuner and Battlefield 2142 PunkBuster - Guru3D.com Forums

I have discussed this with our developers and they acknowledge that it is more than possible as a source of GPU hangs in both Vista and XP. You will also notice if you read the whole thread the complexity of the scenario and the diligence and patience required by the users and the developer.

CATALYSTCATCHER

If you read the thread I linked to above you will understand why I asked about tweakers and online gaming.

I am not an overclocker my self, but I have used tweakers. For example ATItool to check the fan caontrol scenario of the 1900.

All I have to say about OCing hw, is that it has the potential to shorten the life of the HW, particualry when the HW is pushed to far. Therefore OCing can complicate the troubleshooting process. OC=Better performance=Less stability. User beware.

Any possibility you can try another PSU, without spending too much money? Swap with a friend, or borrow a bigger PSU for a couple of days?

You could also try swapping memory with a friend.

You mention that the PC is fairly new.......Any chance that you can go back to the source for assistance?

Be sure to explain to them exactly what is happening and how you need to find a clue to the source of the problem.

In any case, Catalyst 7.9 will be out soon enough so you will have yet another driver to try. But in the mean time you should try what you can to see if there is a HW issue that is contributing.

If the problem is in HW, then the driver will never fix it. So if you are waiting for the magic driver it may be a very long wait.

Remember AGP???? Some users could simply not run at AGP 8X. However dropping to 4X would usually make things better. Believe it or not that was a HW problem. Somtimes the mobo AGP port, sometimes the graphics card. And for the unlucky it was both.

AGP generally speaking had a few defficiencies.
1) no end to end data integrity error checking. ie data would be corrupted on the way to graphics memory, causing display corruption or GPU hangs.
2) 8X uses autocalibration on the AGP bus. This capability was not implimented by all chipsets and the end result was the same as above.

davey

I have the atikmdag problem (or I did - now I just get annoying crashes with no chance for error messages). In my case I believe it is a hardware issue:
a) Because the card used to be in a former (poorly cooled) computer, which eventually broke its motherboard due to high temps, which makes it reasonable that the card might have been damaged;
b) Because crashes happen in a consistent but random manner across all 3D-intensive games.

I have a theory, namely that the problem is that one of the memory chips has been damaged. This is based on the fact that crashes usually occur when large amounts of information are being loaded e.g. load saved game outdoors in TES: Oblivion, load new map in CSS, etc. I therefore suspect that, as the video memory fills up when loading these large amounts of information, the card reaches the broken chip which confuses it and causes it to crash. I don't think it is the system memory as I have run System Memory checks, but I don't know any tools for checking graphics memory.

To get to the point: does anyone know how, using a third-party tool, or a bios hack, I might be able to disable individual memory chips / reduce the amount of memory the card thinks it has (to say, 256/384/448 MB, as I imagine the chips are 64MB each). Alternatively, can anyone think of any other possible causes/solutions. Fan speed fixes etc. do not work, and I don't think the card is overheating, as idle temps are around 35-40 degrees (I would check the load temps, but the card crashes under most heavy loads, but not I think from overheating).

Thanks and keep up the good work, looks like there are some really knowledgeable people on these forums.

__________________
Motherboard: Gigabyte P35-DS3R
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2x2.66GHz
Memory: 2GB Crucial PC2-5300
Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO 512MB
HDD: Samsung 250GB IDE

CATALYSTCATCHER

Bad memory is a very reasonable theory and certainly worth investigating.

Depending on the design of the graphics card and the type and number of memory chips , the memory chips are typically accessed in different combinations. For example pairs or banks of 4. It depends on 1) how many bits wide the memory chip supports and 2) how many bits wide the GPU can access memory with. And other more technical reasons :-)

In any case a single bad memory chip will have the same effect, regardless how they are arranged.

If the memory is marginal you could try underclocking GPU memory to see if things improve.

You can try reducing memory usage as a test to see if crashing takes longer or stops all together. By reducing display resolution. By reducing the display color depth from 32bpp to 16. By backing off on game settings. For example if the game allows changes
to textures use low not hi. But in general reduce all the quality settings.
You can also do these things in combination to see if things get better or worse.

In any case these changes will only provide clues to support or deny your theory. Rather than being proof that memory is bad.

I don't know what is available in the public world to test graphics memory. We certainly have diagnostics in house for that purpose.

Do you ever see any graphics corruption? This is usually present when memory is bad or when the memory is being clocked a little to high to work properly.

Th3_VVr41th

Sorry for my late reply, Connectivety issues still present....

ATI Tool does in fact actually work fine controling the fan speed. It didn't however in the 7.7's and below, very strange. If I set it to adjust the speed according to gpu temp, the fan will spin up or down as it is required. I'm at a loss myself to explain why the ATI Drivers fail in this aspect. Until I was able to read this thread again, I hadn't even thought of trying to get ATI Tool to control the fan based on temp because it never worked before, but apparently it's working with the 7.8s.

Now all that is left is to get the drivers to do it correctly, and then I wouldn't need to use ATI tool at all.

Another thing to consider, is the fact that I get the ATIKMDAG errors well below the card overheating, it happens the second the fan is triggered to spin up, even in the slightest. My card is kept at roughly 40°c idle, and it rarely ever went higher than 65°-70°c full load under XP (I have replaced the stock thermal compound with something better, so my card has always run much cooler than stock...until the 7.2 vista drivers...that is when the idle fan speed dropped to almost nothing, and my idle temps went up, at times to 90°c+ and has been that way since.) If I load up XP, the card functions perfect again, no problems at all, and the idle fan speed is where I remember it to be.

If I'm stuck using ATI tool, so be it, at least I can keep the fan going and I'm not stuck at zero...

__________________

CATALYSTCATCHER

Hmmm, I am leaning away from concerns that HW is the cause of the problem.

Is there any possibility of other apps on the system contributing to this problem?

What apps are running on the system when the crash occurs? I am particularly interested in apps like a virus scanner or possibly anti-cheat software. But essentially anything installed after Windows and the required drivers is of interest.

To level the playing field a little, could you try using the 3Dmark06 demo mode (free download ) to see if it still crashes the system. The demo should raise the GPU temp and trigger the fan to increase in speed. If the problem occurs with 3Dmark running at defaults, then many of the variables are eliminated which makes it easier for us to repro the scenario.

I think I have said it before, but we can't fix something if we can't repeat the problem reliably to determine exactly what occurs. The situation I linked above is intriguing to say the least and demonstrates that obscure combinations of software can easily lead to a problem. Our QA and the developers do test with most popular applications but we can't test every combination of software or hardware.

I know that troubleshooting can be a royal pain, but if we don't persist we may never determine a reason for the problem. It is also unfortunate that you are experiencing internet problems as well, as that just increases the frustration.

Thanks

CC

NHJ

Hello everyone,

here's another computer with the same problem. Unfortunately, it's a laptop, so I'm afraid Toshiba is the only one who can fix this, and I'm already running the latest drivers from their website (sound, graphics, motherboard). System model and specs:

Toshiba Satellite A215-S4747
Windows Vista Premium English
AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-56 (2 CPUs), ~1.8GHz
1 GB RAM
DirectX 10
ATI Radeon X1200, driver version 7.14.0010.0496

(I copied most of this from DXdiag)


Basically, I bought this laptop only about two weeks ago. Ever since, it crashes occasionally. With that I mean that the screen goes black without any warning or indication, and the computer won't react to anything I do except holding the power button to turn it off. One time I got a bluescreen STOP error, blaming our good pal atikmdag.sys (that file was last modified April 24th, 2007).

The crashes appear to be completely random, sometimes they happen within 15 minutes after booting, sometimes after the laptop has been running all day. Sometimes it happens when I'm just browsing the internet, or even just folders in Windows, sometimes when I'm playing Civilization 4. On average it happens once a day. Windows is fully updated, there are no more updates available, not even optional ones. For the rest I'm pretty much only running Avast.

I realize that I could send the laptop to Toshiba, but I can't really do without the laptop, and I do not have access to any other computer. Besides, one or two crashes a day aren't bad enough for that to me. I hoped for some kind of driver update or fix to help me out. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case given this 14-page thread

Anyway, I realize the ATI guys can probably not do much about other manufacturers' laptops, but if you need any details to help pinpoint this, I'll be glad to help.

CATALYSTCATCHER

That statement sums things up accurately. The graphics asic in the laptop is an AMD/ATI but the design of the graphics hardware and the memory in the laptop is from Toshiba. There may even be driver customizations for this laptop. Your only recourse for action is to follow the Toshiba channels and get them to fix your problem. You may have a single system that is behaving badly. Rather than a generic problem that a driver may help. Anyway only Toshiba would have that kind of info if the issue was wide spread.

Being a laptop means that your troubleshooting is far more restricted, but you may be able to cool the system to see if that helps.

All I can suggest is that , if prompted, send an error report to MS. They have the best mechanism to collect data from a system that has crashed.

CC

Steve Chapman

Hi All

I've been scratching my head with this particular problem for a few weeks now - I have a virtually off-the-shelf Dell Dimension. AMD 5000+, 2gig mem, Radeon x1300Pro running Vista. Having run through the drivers, uninstalls - onto wiping my drive and returning to factory settings, then to reformatting and installing from scratch to no avail, Dell finally gave in and said they'd send me a new card, talking me through removing the old card I found that the heat sink was only anchored by the top 2 of the 4 pins (I'd been reluctant to 'open her up' in case it affected my warrantee)

I owe ATI a bit of an apology for some of the profanities that I used - and of course - I wish you all good luck finding the solution to your own machine's issues. Would suggest that you look over the hardware side over drivers though - the only difference the drivers made was changing the message from R300 to atikmdag.

Why on Earth has nobody from Microsoft picked up on the many 100s or 1000s of people who have shown faith with them and invested in their new OS - who have been having problems with this issue - if this is a feature of vista - surely someone has programmed it in - I thought programmers liked telling the World about their achievements - perhaps they are taking vows of secrecy a little too seriously........

Am leaving you all now finally - for a nice long session in Azeroth... fighting against the more realistic demons of World of Warcraft - I want to see how much the end level boss actually resembles Bill Gates

Rockmunky1990

Well, I've had this problem ever since i've upgraded to Vista. Although I've been using the ATITool to force the fan to 100%, I still get the problem, usually as soon as the game itself loads (EG, not the menus).

Looks like i'll have to change my card then?

Here's my DXdiag info

Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6000) (6000.vista_gdr.070627-1500)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: INTELR
System Model: AWRDACPI
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.9GHz
Memory: 1534MB RAM
Page File: 967MB used, 2351MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 6.00.6000.16386 32bit Unicode