does eveyone here have an antec psu?
seems like too much of a coincidence to me.

I do not have an Antec PSU. Mine is an Enhance 200W (comes standard in the Shuttle SN45G XPC)

I emailed ATI earlier today and gave them the link to this forum thread with a note explaining the ASUS driver issues. They replied with a big email with about 100 links to various RADEON related knowledge bases, if anyone wants I can post them here.

guys, i know the problem. it is a heat problem.

evidence:

1. once downgrading to 3.2 drivers (from 3.9), playing a game lasted 150% longer. my theory is 3.2 uses less resources, thus puts less strain on the video card, and ultimately makes the card produce less heat.
2. once removing a side from my case, it is more stable (lasts longer).

ATi cards are known to be VERY VERY hot. my CPU runs at 45C once being used, so obviously, my GPU would be higher. the blue screen is an ATi safety measure, it stops any graphics activity and produces a blue screen, so your GPU will not burn out. it cannot be memory, as if it was memory, the blue screen would have writing and it would say "memory dump". my theory is this is equivalant to Intel's way of shutting down your PC if your CPU exceeds 60 degrees or something, except this does not shut down, but produces a blue screen.

your best bet is to buy an inexpensive heatsink/fan for your card, plus a few extra for your case. i guarantee you you don't have to spend over $35US to fix this problem. plus, with your card being cooler, you can OC it a little

this weekend i'm going out to buy a Zalman ZM80C (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1634/). it costs just $US20, plus i'm going to get an extra fan.

Some issues are heat related sure, but this specific little ASUS SMARTDOCTOR VOLTAGE ISSUE is nothing but a software bug and has nothing to do with heat.I play games for hours fine without using the smartdoctor utility, but as soon as I turn it on, all games or 3d applications jumps back to the desktop within i minute, giving my the oh so familiar "vga bus not given reliable voltage" - error message. This is so obvious Asus have got to release an updated version of the SmartDoctor utility. Also like previously mentioned, the did take the 3.10 version of SmartDoctor OFF their site the other day and to me that is a strong indication they know about the problem. Besides, 60Celius is no where near a dangerous temperature for the Radeon 9800. I would be worried if it reached 70 though, but that will not happen, at least not the the Asus card since the fans are temperature regulated and spins up at your desired temperatures.

Lets hope for a fix very very soon.

i'm using a 9600 Pro.

Its not just an antec problem.
My roomate has a Dell 4600 with a radeon 9800 (dell drivers say its a NP, ATI drivers call it a pro, no clue why).

I've tried quite a few of the cat 3.0 drivers (3.6-3.10), omega drivers, the leaked omega drivers and the ones from dell. All of them have experienced the same problem as what you people describe. Disabling fast writes seem to help marginally...we can play games longer and when it crashes, it doesn't restart the computer (have to manually shut it down)

Are there any specific games that crash like that? Here, Call of duty (despite the ATI hotfix and 3.10) crashes, Freedom fighters, Star Wars KOTOR, and diablo 2 crash. Oddly enough Vice City and a number of other games don't crash.

i'll probably call Dell once my roomate comes back from vacation, and i'll keep you guys posted if there is anything interesting.

Drem drem,

You say the Asus Smart Docter kicks you to desktop, Does it also Lock up your computer with a black screen and sound loop like most of us speek of?

Many of us have the Smart Docter Voltage error, And Many Still have the Black screen with Sound Loop Lock up problum. And I beleve turning off the smart docter wont fix this probum, though I cannot remember if I tryed turning it off befor I sent it back.

Thanks,

I got the black screen error in windows once I think, can hardly remember. Now I dont get it anymore. The sound didnt loop. Now the two remaining problems are the monitor standby when booting OS and and this stupid voltage error.

I spent an hour on the phone with what ati calls custom support. After follow all of there istructions, and completely stripping my computer down to a motherboard and a videocard, i still have no luck. I finnaly called back and got second level, explained the problem, and they said there MUST be somthing wrong with the card. At this point, I put it in my friends computer, same problems. So... I went to Best Buy, and got a second card... If it does not work, they bolth go back, and i am going with a GForce!

Well I have been happily gaming for hours straight today on the A9800XT in agp8x and with fast writes on. SmartDoctor is running in the background BUT with voltage monitoring disabled or I would instantly get the vga voltage error. I am using the Asus bundled drivers, I think they were 3.8 or something. Lets wait and see what they do with the 3.10 ones. I'm still optimistic.

I've been running without problem as well. The only problem I had were the voltage alert and once an out of sync video signal (on a not yet release DX9 game so its not like ATI had a chance to get feedback for the error). Both were fixed with the ASUS 7.8 drivers (3.5 or 3.7 equivalent I think). I think this last batch of drivers from ATI are buggy (3.8-3.9 at least). Haven't tried 3.10. Prior to my XT I ran the 3.4 drivers for months without incident until Call of Duty came out and I had to upgrade to 3.7. I've been playing a lot of games since installing the ASUS drivers (including DX9) and no problems. And Brian, perhaps you just had a bad card? $#!T happens!

As far as a GeForce card vs. Radeon, stick with RADEON. It's rendering is noticably better that nVidia's. And I don't know if nVidia is as stable as it used to be, 2 hardware releases and about 10 software releases since the 9800 Pro came out makes me wonder.

There is another series of posts on the 9600 XT and 9600 Pro that I have been involved in. I did some research and found a solution that corrected the same problem with my 9600 XT. Check out my posts on page 53 of the posts. Here is the link: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/8596/?o=1040

Like I said, it is for the 9600 series, but it seems alot of 9800 series cards have the same symptoms.

Hopefully it will help some people.

Hi, i've bought Hercules 3D Prophet Radeon 9800 and has same crash problems as you, but i've fixed it with a simple think, i turned off the AGP fast writing and all is fine now.
Im using the latest Hercules drivers 3.10

System:
P4 2,4
1024 DDR333
WinXP SP1
DX9
MSI 648max
Hercules Radeon 9800

Smart Doctor 4.0 is available at ASUS' Web site. Installed it and no more Smart Doctor related problems, not even the screen flicker at Windows bootup.

http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/r9800xt/overview.htm

Pete Temp:

Hmm, are you sure about that? We are many who tried SD4 with the exact same problems persisting. I think default settings for SD4 is error reporting disabled, can you see if that is the case with your setup? Try enabling all error reporting and see if it doesn't jump back to the desktop when you run a game.

Also the "black screen on boot" is still persistent for those I have spoken to, you say yours disappeared?? Which drivers do you have installed and did you also install the Asus enhanced drivers from the bundled cd?

Thanks

Yup, same old crap with the voltage shelling you out of a game. The defaults were unchecked voltage reporting. Still can't read the warning, it was a paragraph this time. However, the blanking of the screen is definitely gone. Somehow my prior installation of Smart Doctor completely corrupted the screen after "blanking out" twice. I uninstalled SD and re-installed 4.0, now my two main issues are okay -- no more blanking, and it actually remembers the smart fan setings upon reboot. The screen blanking was so bad before, that if you focused the mouse on another app before Smart Doctor finished loading you'd completely lose video signal!

I am using the ASUS 7.93 drivers from the bundled CD and have no other ASUS apps installed other than the drivers and Smart Doctor.

Ok, this thread is somehwat depressing, as I've had a 9700Pro for about a year and experienced the very same problem for about half of it. Was considering getting a new card, the 9800XT being the prime contender, but if the very same problems still exist with a newer card 12 months later something is seriously wrong at ATi, why the hell hasn't this been dealt with? I've seen lots of threads with 30+ pages on this very problem, it's not like it's just a few isolated incidents, or even just concerned with one card!

For the record, I've never found any real solution, the closest answer being that some mobos implementation of x8 AGP is dodgy (intel) but I've also seen people with VIA chipsets have this problem too. I've read lots (esecially from ATi) about power issues, but people are using different branded PSUs and 400w+ too, so that's a farce. It's a shame that what are supposedly the 'best' cards on the market are so bugged for so many.

Here're a couple of my last posts on the topic:

http://www.community.tomshardware.com/forum/showflat.m?Cat=&am...d&sb=5

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33732364

For the record, my specs:

PIV 2.4, 533FSB MSI GNBMax (MS6565, Intel E7205), 1024mb DDR 266, Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro,
SonicFury 5.1, 2* WD360GD (Raptor), WD400JB (Caviar), Yamaha CRW-F1 CDR-W, Hitachi GC7000 DVD,
Enermax 460w EG465AX-VE(G) PSU, Coolermaster ATC210cAX-1, 19" Iiyama 1451
Visionmaster, Altec Lansing 5100, Fujitsu FDX310 ADSL Modem. WinXP SP1, DirectX 9.0b

[double-post]

Just for the record I would like to say that I run AGP8X / FastWrites ON with NO problems whatsoever. Only problem here is the BUGGY SmartDoctor and the black-screen-on-boot issue.