i viewed my ampere ratings:

+3,3V = 35A
+5V = 35A
+12V = 33A

5V seems to be too weak, but may this really be the source of all my troubles? oO

Maybe, but your 12V is amazing.

i wish my 12 volt read 33.... i have 24... maybe its not just the 12 volt we have to consider.. but the 5 volt as well because the ati slot is 5 volt...

Mine:

12v=24a
5v=55/66a

Well, I took my 9800XT in, seems defected, sending it back to ASUS, gonna take 4-8 weeks UGH!

im stuck with my gf4mx420 again.................

if the radeon uses the 5V then there must lie the problem, cuz the reboots only appear when i'm using 3d-applications
but damn, this is just too vague. i don't to buy a new psu for nothing <_< and i don't have one to test :p

yeah but if more people did with the higher ratings.. and it worked wouldn't it be worth it... and most places have a 30 day money back anyways.. so whats there too lose out on accept for it working?

Don't worry, the new ATI 420 cards use way less power than the 9800 XT.
NVidia 6800 Ultra needs 3 times the power than the 9800 XT.

I am having the same problem with crashing and rebooting.

I have a 9800PRO 128 megs
MB is asus AS45gt/r
256 ram
2.6gig intel

The problem happens USUALLY when i play a highend game IE call to duty battlefield.

The wierdest thing though is yesterday i got this message:


"Your ATI 9700(which i don't even have) video card is not connected to a power source"

Anyone have that problem?

Wanted to add that,I couldn't even boot up.When i did try to boot up ,my comp would beep like mad and this message was in big bold red letters in a DOS type screen.

yep, theres no power going to your video card... thats a definate problem.. ati 97-9800 won't let you boot without power plugged into it.

unfortunately did my problems appear on my gf2mx400, too

OK....I flashed my bios to upgrade it so I could get at the settings to my AGP data transfer rate....I set it to X8 and guess what??? IT WORKED LIKE A DREAM!

I spoke to my contact at ATI and he said that all this talk of PSU's is "Horse s**t" hey...he is Canadian! ;-)

By his reckoning only old OEM PC set ups will have a problem and that 300w PSU will run it and that most of the problems are connected with other issues such as the problem I had or shared IRQs or simply incorrect installation of drivers.

Actually he said replacing a PSU is pretty drastic and that ALL other channels should be exhausted first before even contemplating such a move....

I for one agree...My problem was caused by the OEM builder of my PC setting my mobo to X4 and then hiding the settings for X8...I guess they thought I would always keep the original card in there! ;-)

I am not saying James and Super XP are wrong because clearly in their case and some others it obviously worked...but I would suggest that the other solutions put forward in this forum and my own should be considered first as they are realtively easy to do and involve zero to little outlay.

Anyways, I hope everyone will get their cards working at their full capacity otherwise whats the point...good luck people!

[q]yep, theres no power going to your video card... thats a definate problem.. ati 97-9800 won't let you boot without power plugged into it[/q]

It IS connected though ,James.

In the midst of me having these crashing problems,that message came out the blue.

I turned computer off,removed it from slot and reinserted,and it's now doing what it did before....crashing rebooting,but i havent got that message again.

Dave Cox: your contact eh? Well thats call tech support here in the us. And i was on the phone with them for prolly a total of 3 days time. That many hours. And they ran me through everything, drivers, bios, other settings, hardware changing, irq's, remove hardware, pulling case fans, and everything. I reinstalled windows 3 times, i installed older version of the drivers, i shut off vpu recovers, i shut off this, i cranked up graphics, i cranked down graphics.

But the one thing that was never mentioned was a psu change, by either my Tyan Motherboard manufacturer, nor ATI themselves. But tyan did mention that there was a great possibilty of the card running out of power because yes tyans boards infact do have a low 1.5 volt specification and it cannot be changed.. nor can any part of it be overclocked.

So i simply started researching psu's, posts to various problems that were resolved by psu changes, and reguardless of what ati said and quite frankly tyan was more helpfull then ati was and ever will be. The fact is some people on here it actually helped, some it didn't, in fact i just talked a guy that bought a psu that was rated amp higher then mine and it didn't work for him.

Now the thing is why did replacing the cpu stabilize mine? Maybe its power stability in the psu, maybe its amperage, maybe its just how much power the mobo draws weather or not it can be changed.

The point is its not so much drivers like ati says, yeah they may stabilize it but what they don't tell you is with the newer versions, the graphics are optimized better and run cleaner and thus use way more 3d power, more power usage in the psu and so on and so forth.

And for christ sake.... its not x4 and x8... its called AGP 4x or 8x... get the order right man..

And the bios on a mobo doesn't come fully updated. You always have to do that yourself or at least anyone i have ever heard of or messed with i had to flash the bios myself. In your case you should have checked that as the first option. Right there goes to show you really can't comment on anything here.. just ask for help. Because anyone here would have first checked there bios... and then moved on.

I wish this thread would just die, its a lost damn cause.. there is no fix.. thers chance.

But here goes, this should be the last time anyone needs to read this because after this list there is no fix.

1. Update bios
2. Turn off Fastwrite
3. Set Apeture size to 64
4. If applicable try agp voltage 1.6-2.0 for stability
5. Turn of fastwrite in windows
6. Turn off vpu recover, system error reporting, and auto restart on blue screen.
7. Do not use overdrive its a waste of time.
8. Check irq conflics, video card likes to be mixed with soundcard ocasionally and has cause problems.
9. Update Directx9.0b
10. Update your chipset wether it be VIA or AMD
11. Open SMARTGART using the RUN command in the start menu, turn off agp read.
12. Make sure the card is not reaching more then 120 degrees farenheit (120+ causes instability)

>--------AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST-----------<

13. Buy a new PSU to try. But this is the specs that I want everyone to look for when buying and you may or may not know this.

550-650 watts rated:

12volt = 20amps - 45amps or highest you can find
5volt = 50amps - 70amps or highest you can find
3volt = 30+ amps or highest you can find

This will provide your system with as stable of power as possible. And the psu that worked was:

A+GPB 550 Watt (mwave.com for 105.00)

This is all that anyone on this board can offer you. There is no other fixes, thats it... fineato... l8r

Yea i just brought a new PSU 500W NorthQ4100 Kingkong Extreme and it rocks [ 8 )
I can play Gamez for hours, even with VPU Recover and AGP-wright\read turned on
My old 300W didnt seem to give me the power that my newly broughted Sapphire R9800PRO needed

500W 300W
+3.3V - 28A +3.3V - 20A
+5V - 50A +5V - 30A
+12V - 28/30*A +12V - 13A

then tell me, in my case, why is my psu insufficient for a gf2mx400? oO

a guy i was just helping with a new psu that didn't totally fix it fixed his problem.. and his is the new 64 processor.

He used sisoft sandra to see that his ram was set to cas 3. Well he went into the bios and it was set to auto instead of cas 3.. well he then put it on cas 3 instead of auto and his computer has been stable since.

If everyone has that option.. check that in your bios... make it an actually setting instead of auto.. worked for him.

asdf, i can't even find a single psu reaching the requirements posted here i searched every hardware-onlineshop for it
even the model you posted isn't sufficent

I got my ATI 9800Pro to work on a Codegen PSU 400W, $28 from newegg.com. At first, there were some CTD when playing FS2004 but after installing a newer version of drivers everything went fine.