9500 lockup problem with Cat 4.3 - looking for advice

farley2k

I just bought a Radeon 9500 np since my Ti4200 was getting a bit old (plus I wanted all the fancy stuff with Far Cry!). I do plan to softmod the 9500 at some time but to start with I have simply installed the official cat 4.3 drivers to make sure everything works fine.

However it doesn't work fine.

When running 3D mark it *always* locks-up at about frame 760 of the first test (the airplane one). The screen locks up, then after a couple seconds the monitor blanks out saying no input detected and I have to hard reboot to get anywhere.

Any ideas why?

Let me go over a few obvious things before people mention them.

1. Heat. I don't see how it could be overheating becuase I can play No One Lives Forever 2 for hours without any lock ups. No matter if I run the test right after turning on the computer, or do it after playing other games for hours the result is *always* a lock up during that first test.

2. I have reinstalled DirectX 9.b

3. Before installing I did run driver cleaner to remove the old Nvidia drivers.




For a solution I have found that I can go back to the 4.2 drivers and even use the softmodded ones with no problem what-so-ever. However it just bothers me that hte 4.3 drivers lock up like this and I wondered if that means there is something wrong with the card I just bought.

I am sure the best advice is to just install the 4.2 softmod drivers and be happy I bought a 9500 and can run it at 9700 speeds but I wondered if anyone had any insight anyway and thought I would post this question.

Thanks for any help!

Farley

Callandor

Just run the card with the 4.2 cat drivers. I run 4.2 on my 9500np and it works like a charm. Don't bother with the newer drivers.
Besides, ATi recommends you "DO NOT" install newer drivers if your current ones are running
fine.
NEWER ISNT ALWAYS BETTER!!!!!! The radeon 9500np itself proved this and thats why it was discontinued by ATi. (check out www.overclockers.ru to see how it wooped 9700pro's butt!)
Oh, and by the way, I too have done the 9700mod and i strongly encourage you to do it too.

Callandor

Alternativley, check out this link >>> www.warp2search.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=17139 to see some updated news on the 4.3 cat drivers.

Apparently there was a problem with 4.3 cat, so they had to do some patches. And then, there was a problem with the patches but thats been fixed according to this link. Check it out and be happy ^_^

nauticus

Uh, try upgrading to the newer 8.07 beta video drivers, much beter than what you are using, and likely to fix your problem.

I recomend getting the Omega Drivers at www.omegadrivers.net, because they're really fast and you have an option to softmod a 9500np during installation and Overclock with no BIOS-swapping mayhem.