I finished my current system about a month or so ago. I chose an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro over a 4600 at the time, mainly because: a)the specs on the ATI were (are) incredible, and b) my budget could swing the $$$ for the ATI.
Now I am reconsidering. The ATI renders 2D great; the system is rock-solid stable in everyday operations, but gaming is a no-go. Crashes and lockups are the recurring issues . I have tried all the driver updates - both for the vid card and the mobo. Tried tweaking the bios on the mobo (have not flashed to a new bios, yet).... have tried several different things from several different forums. No luck. No joy in Mudville.
If anyone here wants to take a stab at it, please do so... your suggestions are welcome.
Current system specs:
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP rev 1.1 with F4 bios
VIA 4in1 driver ver 4.43
Athlon XP2400+ (not oc'd)
ATI Radeon Pro 9700 with 6.13.10.6200 driver
Win XP Pro SP1 with all current updates
DirectX 8.1b
Personally speaking, I'd RMA thing back to ATI and say it was overheating. Wouldn't be surprised if you got one with the shim slightly out of spec, thereby preventing the heatsink from making good contact with the VPU. They've got a **** load of these cases already.
Ive heard a few complaints about the R9700, as brian says, get it replaced, give the card another go - and if it keeps playng up try it in another system, if it works fine there then flog it and get sumink else
Well as far as i can see all people who are having trouble always uses the Default install and not using Standard PC, and they keep ACPI enabled which is a big bad boy that hasn't grown up yet
when you Depends (LMAO ) on ACPI you are basically playing the roulette, if you are lucky things will work for you, if you are not, this is the kind of stuff you'll see
and now more than ever, with all those **** mobos with build in everything, it really sucks the **** out of the system resources
not leaving you much room to configure the stuff to work properly
heck all the parts i have on my system works excellent for me
yet i've read from hundreds of other people complaining about **** this **** that, and drivers this driver that.
and it always ends up being the same thing
Configuration, and Win OS
PC are not Lego pieces, they don't work out of the box by just putting all the parts together
if that's what you expected maybe a MAC might be more of your choice.
that's exactely what a friend of mine did
he got so fed up with the PCs having to always configure everything that he got a MAC just for Games and the PC to fool around with WinCrap
No amount of OS tweaking or configuration can fix this:
The fact that it's locking up on you only during games or heavy usage tells me it's overheating. This is an example of bad design where it's not guaranteed that the cooling unit is not even given a chance to do it's work.
WoW thats WAYYYY off. Man thats gotta be atleast .10". My god. How can they be that screwed up. Some right others not, time to look at the manufacturing process Id say there is a mighty huge bug!
Welp, I guess it's time for you to fix some ATI mistakes with your mighty tools, Brian48
Take that .10" away and cooling should be good, I already saw few o/cer over the Web doing it.
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers
yo man there is also a later version for you mobo out there i do belive. I have the same mobo, the ga -7vaxp. i think its the f5 version, it increases the speed for your agp. try that man. I also was having crashes and things with my radeon 8500 in that bord but i rolled back to catalyst 2.2 and it worked for me. Im planning on getting the AIW 9700pro, so tell me how it goes~!