The problem that causes crashes is written with 3 letters ***!

Use your HEAD James Miller

My new nForce 2 drivers are conflicting with my ATI's Smartgart.

HELLO???? ARE U THERE.

simple then.. don't install the chipset drivers that came with the motherboard.... duhhh...

and aslo disable the onboard display adapter too because there should be no way that a motherboard can conflict if the onboard video is disabled either in the bios or the board itself.

ok i had this problem like 2 months ago and i read this thread and fixed my problem (as far as i know). i just retuirned to see how its going and i feel i should just add my 2 cents.

i had the exact same problems and pretty much everyone else here. all i did was move my ram so it was no longer in dual channel. then i turned off apg read and agp write.

works fine. i can play battlefield vietnam for hours and hours with everything cranked up. i can also run far cry demo.

id also like to add, everyone chill out. theres obviously more than one way to solve it and different people will have different things which work for them. DONT go buy a new psu without trying everything else, no matter how small it sounds.

tomorrow im gonna try putting my ram back into dual channel! will tell you how it goes if anyone cares.

specs:
Athlon 2800+ XP
Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2
GeXcube Radeon 9800XT 256mb
2x512 Apacer DDR Dual Channel Ram

i dunno, maybe its just my new clear side on my case which fixed it?

just curious:
what does apg read and write do?
does it really matter if they are turned off?

it bascially error checks and keeps track of the data going in and out of the ram and can provide better or more stable throughput.. but in some cases its just not compatible.. you can turn it off in some new bios on motherboards but mostly with ati's utility that isntalls with the latest drivers. Go to RUN and type SMARTGART into the open field and hit enter.. then turn off agp read and agp write.

Hi Guys.

I have a radeon 9800XT also, but from sapphire and no probs at all. Card is smokin through everything I throw at it. Alot of you seem to have an antec power supply which seem to be causing probs. I know when I was updating my drivers with omega the performance went down alot. I know the Omega drivers are recommended even by ATI as very good, but they can conflict with sound cards etc. Stick to the original drivers and clock with the radlinker if you wish. (although with the 9800XT you wont have too)

I have the Thermaltake butterfly PSU 550w, Man that is one hell of a power supply as the 9800XT is a hungry SUCKER for power.


Cheers!

AGP "Accelerated Graphics Port" You get better performance with this enabled. i.e.: 1x, 2x, 4x & 8x.
With mine set to 8x, I get an extra 50 to 80 FPS, then when it is not enabled.

actually the reason your 9800 xt is stable is because you have an msi board.. so far everyone i hae talked to even the one i had on hand didn't crash with it. It has nothing to do with the psu in this case.. its just msi doesn't crash witht he board because it supports more agp power... now asus on the other hand...

I have a MSI neo 865 motherboard and an ATI 9800 Pro and have the same game freezes.
It has worked fine with not a single problem for about two months then suddenly i start to get these game crashes.

When playing warcraft 3 it will just suddenly crash, I swap the 9800 pro for a radeon 7000 and i don't get any crashes. Could the card be faulty? The computer doesn't crash when not playing games.

try the 9800 pro again but go into RUN and open a proram called SMARTGART.. just type it in.. turn off agp read and write... then tell me if it still crashes.. but 2 months passed to start doing that it does sound like a psu problem in your case as well .

Tried that game doesn't even load up?

then put it back to default and do a scan with sisoft sandra and make sure your rams cas settings are right.. im trying to prove a theory with this.. just download it and try a ram, scan or info and see what they are then double check the bios and see if there right.. if not manually set them and see if that changes anything.

not quite crashing but thought you guys on this thread may be able to help

right ill try to give you as much info about my problem as i can and hope some one can help

i installed a sata h/d about 2 months ago, for a month everthing was fine until one day i switched on my pc and it had a problem it booted up got to the windows xp screen with the loading green bar running across the bottom and that was it it just keep going as though it couldn,t find my h/d or o/s.
so i booted it up in safe mode and did a system restore. this worked fine but the next time i switched it on same problem, went in in safe mode and it wouldn,t allow system restore.Anyway after 2 days trying to suss it out i gave up and reformatted
know i didn,t go for the quick format but even still it only took about 20secs to format the drive i thought this was strange so i didit again and the same about 20secs to format it.
So i installed everything again(now it was at this time i noiticed that even though i have an 9800xt with cat 4.3 drivers the smart gart had agp setting to off) and it didn,t matter what i did it wouldnt allow it to be change , the card worked fine with the likes of far cry etc but i thought the agp would be set to 8 x.

so everthing was back on and working well until last thursday when the same problem occurred at start up , got around it in safe mode with a restore but then it was just a repeat of the first time so i formatted again(again only 20 secs to format the drive) loaded everything up and it was fine , next day it started up fine and worked so i installed a game(IL2 sturmovik) following day back to the same problem as though it got stuck on the windows screen and could find my h/d o/s.

got round it with restore and it has been fine since but im just waiting for it to happen again.

so after all that could anyone provide answers to any of the following

1) why is my 9800xt setting set to agp off and can,t be altered( agp 8x is set in my bios)
2) any ideas what could be causing this start up problems.
3) it seems to occur after installing games(h&d2/sturmovik) are these likley to be the cause
my system spec is as follows
athalon xp2700+ running @2.17
1gig pc3200 ram
hercules 3d prophet 9800xt with cat4.7 drivers from omega(problem happens with ati drivers too)
windows xp home edition sp1 all updates download
mobo ias a gigabyte ga-7vt600 1394

here try this site, it appears that Onboard sound is Still Crap, even the NF2 n such http://www.ardvens.org/Radeon/Help.html

Right finally solved all my problems.

P4 2.8
Audigy 2
9800xt 256

Board Asrock p4vt8 - this uses via drivers (using 4.49)

Been experiencing many of the problems u ppl have been having - had card for about 2/3 months.

Quite basically what made my card stable no lock ups no stupid vdu recovery agp speed x 8 and fast wirte on, is use the 4.3 catalyst drivers - make sure on yr board u have agp speed set x8 and fast write enabled.

This works fine for me all other catalyst drivers from 4.1,4.2,4.4 to 4.7 Cause my system problems (vpu recovery during games /fmvs - couldnt set agp speed above 2 - couldnt enable fast write - completely unstable and a paine in the ass) - tried all via drivers using different ati drivers, this has taken me a week.

Hope this helps some people.

So my advice is use the motherboard drivers that came with yr board. Then install 4.3 catalyst drivers, making sure yr bios is set correctly.

If u have a via chipset and this doesnt work then install 4.49 via drivers - and reinstall 4.3 catalyst drivers.

I will not be updating my graphic card drivers in future - If it aint broke DONT FIX IT!

Hi,

I had the same problems with my Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. Windows operation would run fine, but (intensive) 3D games would just crash. Sometimes it would take 5 minutes, sometimes half an hour or an hour and then the sound started looping and the whole system just froze. After reading the posts on this forum and others I got discouraged. New PSU? Unstable AGP voltages? New MoBo? Thanks, I just want to play a few games, not rebuild my computer.

So I decided to take the card back to the shop and ask advice. The guy there said he had similar problems with his 9700 in the past, and just added two fans to the system casing. One in the front to suck in cool air. One in the back to let hot air out. I went home, took an old computer I had lying around (an old Silicon Graphics system, please don't kill me!) and took out the fans. Connected them to my MoBo, one in the front, one in the back and ran Doom 3 for 6 hours straight without a hitch.

Obviously things may be different for you guys, but overheating seems to be a common problem. I think it's one of the first things to sort out before ordering new expensive parts you might not need. The only problem now is that my computer sounds like a vacuum cleaner...


Oh, and here are my specs:
Chaintech CT-9BJF MoBo (Intel 845G + ICH4) - 4x AGP
Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.7 Mhz
512 Mb DDR 333Mhz
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mb
I'm running the latest version of the Omega Drivers based on the Catalyst 4.7 ATI drivers.

Hi,

Ive had an ASUS Radeon 9800XT for about a week now, with the lock-ups happening at random intervals. I had to completely power off the PC to get it to startup again. However, I have since fixed my problem (as far as i know) - any people having this problem, make sure the card's power connector is connected directly to the PSU, not through any other devices.

Spec:
Athlon 2400+
Gigabyte GA-7N400-L
Q-Tec 550W PSU

read thru this site http://www.ardvens.org/Radeon/Help.html

Also try the video card in another System