Thanks for all the help chaps. I have now, as per your advice, lowered my AGP slot in the bios to 4x and set my AGP Apature to 128 instead of 256. And system temp has always been cool.

The results are promising so far my card hasn't crashed any 3D apps. I am still noticing other glitches in games, where once there was none before the 9800XT though.
Also it still affects my media players, with hang-ups and unexpected closure of those media players, on files I have watched before with no previous problems.
I think I will approach the Manufacturers next, to see if they can offer a solution to all my graphic woes.
At least my games are playable now, so again my thanks to you all. I will keep you appraised of what happens in my 9800XT soap-opera.
Cheers.
Dan.

No one wants to give me a tutorial on determining what good amperage ratings are? ? Plz ?

Nothing like the good old 9800XT. Do they still excist? I am sure you can find them on eBay selling for as much as a X1800XL. People are nut's LOL,

This thread is officially 2.5 years old I think

And some of us have had the card for that long. Certainly a good buy. On eBay the go for less than £100 if you lucky still 256mb and I can play all the games. don't need to upgrade just yet.

Ok folks. . . I have literally read the entire forum and I must say, it has been a tremendous help in doing some fault analysis on my own system.

Windows XP Pro w/ SP 2
Direct X 9.0c
ASUS P4P800 MOB (plus current BIOS)
Intel Pent. 4 3.0 GHz Processor (NO O/C!!)
4 Gig G Skill DDR400 RAM (4x1 gig stiks set in bios to 400 MHz)
Maxtor 160 GB, 7200 rpm
WDC 40 GB
NEC optical DL DVD burner
Intel Springdale i865PE chipset
Demon 580 Watt PS
Creative SB0350 Audigy 2 ZS w/ 5.1 Logitech Speakers
and of course my ba***rd child. . .
Radeon 9800xt vid. card. . (Manf. by ASUS)

I also have the . . .

Thermaltake Tower112 Pure Cu 4 in 1 CPU cooling kit
(CPU runs CONSISTANTLY at 29 C. .never higher than 35)

and

Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer 3 (Rev. 2) Hi. Perf. VGA cooler
(Vid. card runs MAX at 43 C fully loaded)

So let's review. . .

1) I know for a F A C T that MY issue here is most def. not HEAT!
(i'm not gonna' list all my fans. .but trust me. .i have some serious air moving through this thing)
2) It's NOT an issue with system stability, driver vs., lack of Memory or BAD memory, or the operating system, harddrives, etc, etc. .
3) I have disabled FastWrite in SmartCrap..er. .SmartGart, VPU recover is off, Auto recover is off, autoRestart is off, so is System Restore.
4) VGA aperature size is 256, AGP speed is 8x (supported), AGP version is 3.00

Lemme appologize now for this long post, but it seems we need to cover a BROAD range of info. to accurately inform current/future poster's.

So there I am with this beast of a machine getting ready to Whip some A$$ in BF2, I start to play only to encounter the dreaded "banshee black-screen-+-screech-of-death-loop-sound" about 15 min. into the game. . after I $hart myself. . I got really damn mad. After some poking around, I found that my IRQ ports are NOT shared (eliminate that prob.) and the rest you've read above. (ALL components are new from NewEgg)
So! What could it BE?!?!?!
This is what I did to narrow down the problem.

1) Initially, I did NOT have all of the awsome cooling power and the Card would run at 57 C!. Changed all that, still crashed.
2) Put cooling unit on CPU. Still crashed.
3) Adjusted and fiddled with BIOS and various settings till my a$$ grew roots to the chair. STILL crashed!!!
4) Pointed a Smith and Wesson .44 mag at box and demanded that it WORK. . .still. . .crashed.
5) Rested head on desk to begin sobbing. . .and THAT'S when I heard IT!!!. . .a small sound almost like when you run the back of your fingernail down the fins of a cooling unit. . very faint but def. issuing from inside the tower somewhere. It was unique and distinct enough that it made my hackels go up. Not surprisingly enough, this sound emanated and got LOUDER as I continued to stress the Vid card. After some time, the comp. would crash as before. Any Guesses?!?!

It was the brand new 580 Watt PS!!!! TAHHHDAHHHH~!!

As the vid card gets into it's routine of cruching all of those wonderful commands from a seriously demanding 3D game, it calls for more power. It uses this juice to run not only it's processor and memory, but also the various fans and hard-drives and whatever other bells and whistles you may have.
The sound was the PS's internal Stepdown Transformer and various circuitry trying to supply that awsome load to the Vid card and it was taxing it so badly that it would kick itself off line much the way a fuse in a GFCI house socket does when a device pulls too many amps for that rated socket!
I have now taken a completely Different Power Supply, hooked it up independently of the internal one, connected ONLY my Vid card and cooling fans to that unit (Antec True Power 430 Watt) and left the HD's, optical drives, and MOBO connected to the internal PS.

I have been playing CS Source for about 8 solid hours now and I've been accused about 7 times of H4CKING. (haven't tried BF2 yet.) NO crashes, NO hangups, NO banshee wail of death.
So the skinny for ME is, basically just because the PS says it can supply enough power to run New Jersey for a month doesn't mean it will actually do this. Blame it on the manufacturer, satan, whoever.
When you run your tests, or games, turn the volume down on your speakers, take the case cover off and listen closely. It ALMOST sounds like a DVD on it's initial spin up. IF you hear that, get your ear close to the PS unit. Continue to do whatever you're doing until the system crashes (no harm there 'cause i'm assuming it's already done this to you about 10 teen times by now) but LISTEN to see if the sound increases in volume or freq.
I hope this will help SOME of you, I know it won't fix all problems. I agree with the "settings" posts from earlier as well. MAKE SURE you're not "bottle-necking" your system in the BIOS settings. 4x, 8x, aperature 64, 128, 256, directX, etc, etc. Yes. . it WILL take tweaking.
Damn ATI's EYES for the problems with this supposedly superior 9800 creature and it's lust for power! (also a good damning heaped upon their tech support too! . .it that's what u want to call it).
Thanks to all those who've kept this MONSTROUSITY of a thread alive, it is a good source of info even if it IS over 8 thousand years old. Good luck to all and gg'ing in the future. I wish success to you all!

The Panzuki
M.S.E.E (control systems)
WVUTECH

When was the last time you Formated your HD & re-Installed a fresh copy of XP ? This is what I recommend. It usually solved many problems & give your system a kick start in performance.

Also, try using the ATI CCC 6.3 drivers for your 9800XT card


Take Care,

Hey Super XP,

For my system when I installed the Vid. card, it was also a fresh install for WinXP with SP2 slip-streamed onto the disk. (Installed XP first, then the vid. card drivers)
Currently we now have PCI-X cards that are capable of being "tied together" to use the processing power of both cards. So, if you have 2 x 256Mb cards, you can link them together to have the processing power of an equivalent 512Mb Vid. card.
(I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that, just an FYI for future thread readers). : )
Upon calling the Manf. they even agree that Power consumption is a major issue. Some of my Ubergeek friends have even gone so far as to get a hold of OLD AT power supplies with the ON/OFF switch (not ATX switching), run those independantly of their MOB's (only for HD's, small fans, etc. .) and then use their HARDCORE power for just the devices that really need it. (Vid cards, BIG case fans, MOB, etc. . .)
Crafty lil' bastiches!
On a side note, I've now FULLY opened up every setting on my card to FULL. . . .8x, 256 aperature, (still have SmartGart off though ) etc. . . NO probs.
I've played BF2, CS:Source, CoD II, the rendering is BEEYOOOTEEFULL, no artifacts, no weird shading, NO CRASHES. . (my fav!).
I'd like to thank all who posted on this thread again because it really is a valuable resource. Keep up the good fight!

The Zuki
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everything that is called duty, the prerequisite for all genuine law and the substance of every noble custom, can be traced back to HONOR. If one has to think about it, one is already without honor.

HI I was having the black screen after a couple seconds of gaming problem and it seems to be fixed XD. I have a 9800XT and tried everything from reformatting and reinstalling a bunch of drivers. I followed a couple posters suggestion of bringing down the agp from 8x to 4x, and i have been gaming CS:S for over an hour problem free, it appears to be fixed, before i couldnt get longer than 10 seconds of gaming. Now my question is, am i sacrificing any performance by running at 4x and what exactly does this do?
thanks for all the help

damn i hate getting to threads late, well can i help.?

I have had a Radeon 9800XT for almost 12 months now and thought I was on my own tilll I read this forum. Almost every 3D game I have crashes after a certain amount I time, black screen PC resets etc.

In the end I contacted ATI, and by their own admission they said the card needs repairing so I must send it back to Canada. Great, slight problem in that I am a UK resident. This is not a software issue, temp issue, not is it a driver issue. Its a fundamental design prob with the card and ATI are very reluctant to admit it.

Will I loose any performance if I drop AGP down to 4x in the bios? Has anyone who has done this on the forum noticed anything?

I might just f**k it off into the trash and go back to NVidia, they were far less trouble!

i was having the exact same problems as you, with the crashing and black screens and turning the agp down to 4x fixed everything for me, its been running perfectly for a couple weeks on intense gaming everyday. i havent noticed any decrease in performance at all and am perfectly content with my card now. I'd turn the agp down before you send it back, itll probably work for you.

turning off VPU Recovery and Automatic Restart of windows helps stop the problems aswell, but what i think all need to do is get some BGA Ramsinks, put em on cause the default cooling is not enuf.

For Mark D. Go back in this form to Nov 7 05 (larry keatley) . If you are continue to have a problem after reducing AGP to X 4 try turning down the sound accelleration as per this post. It really works if your game is sound looping as It freezes. You can always turn it back up when you are not playing the game that is causing problems.

you can also adjust the bus speeds by getting PCI latency tool, setting it to 64 actually works, also leaving the AGP Aperture at 64 is recommended

If there is a problem with the 9800XT then send it back to ATI so they can repair it? And I am assuming that they are not going to charge you right?

Anyway, NVIDIA is also responsible for there faulty GeForce 4 Ti 4200 graphics cards. They just crash with black screen when playing games longer then about 1 hr at a time. And many times, the system won't even detect the card. I still have this card on my desk, because it just won't show any display. In another forum, there were many people having similar problems with the GeForce 4 series of cards, but anyway.

Good Luck,

I do not think it a power issus at all. I have a friend's machine that has experienced the same problems as everyone else. I took this machine hooked it up to my setup at home (meaning I just pluged in some cords where my computer sat. and hooked up to my monitor). The machine ran great for hours figured what ever I did must have worked, I even tried it on a different spot in my house to see if it was running good. (I hooked it up to where another computer was sitting) I gave back to him said it looks fine to me, he set it back up and as soon as he went to play a game it got the black screen. The only difference in setups at the houses are the monitors. Has any one thought to look at the monitors. The monitors at my house are 3 years old+. Maybe these new fangled monitors are the problems. Someone look into this please.

I Have an Samsung SyncMaster 550s i think its pretty old. i have exact same probs with my 9800xt those being. crash to desktop after about 5-20 mins gameplay in directx 9 games. Sometimes it give me a vpu recover message. i think depending on what drivers you have it sometimes give a message saying Critical exeption fault or something that the memory could not be read. my specs: I have always had this problem ever since i got my pice or S*** pc. the vid card has always ran at around 57 -67 sometimes 72 degree on hot day in games. After sending the whole computer back they said they fix it and it seemed like they had, no crashes for atleast 2 months, i dunno what they did. the crashes only seemed to happen now after the card reached 70 degree for a while. I took all the plastic crap and the stock fan off the vid card and put an old amd processor fan on and put 2 case fans superglued togerther facing flat on the back of the card. it now runs at about 53 in games 58-60 on hot days. But i still get the crashes just the same as before. ive tried everything exept more heat sinks for the ram.

My whole computer has been very weird and dodgy ever since i got it. it goes through periods of being stupid. For a month it might crash heaps in games and be a little un responsive in windows sometimes. Other times the motherboard has made a strange beep that sounds like a cd spinning up or something and the whole system freezes for a sec then returns to normal. i has done this so bad before that i thort my mb was f**ked, so i turned the pc off and didn't use it or a while then one day i decided to play a game and it worked fine for 2 or more hours of gameplay no crashes or nothing. then you think well maybe its fixed it self after a few days you discover some other weird problem that starts to occur. Like it wont post for some reason even though it worked fine the day before, no changes in windows nothing! after a while it works. Then u might get the vpu recover thing happening heaps. I just wana put my Case with all in it, maybe take out processor, in a big garbage bag and p**s in it and send it back to computer parts land.

asus a7n8xe deluxe motherboard.
amd 3200+ 2.2ghz
ge cube 9800xt poo card
2x 512 mb kingston ddr

I was having the exact same problems as all of you are having I have a Radeon 9800 pro I thought the card could of been faulty so I got a Geforce 6600 but the crashes still happened so i thought it could of been over heating.

So all I did was simply move my tower from the confined space it was in, into a place where there was more space and it works perfectly!!!

The hot air could not escape out of the sides or the back as they were faceing the wall causing the computer to crash.

Ok i have managed to lower the card temp to 45 on desktop and 52 after a while of the spinning cube in atitool.
It still crashes just the same. I am convinced it is a compatability issue maybe with certain drivers.
i read before in these posts that a good power supply is needed i have an omni 400w power suply. Can anyone varify if changing the power supply actually works.

I had just built a new pc a few weeks ago running a dual core 3.2gig intel processor, 512 meg video card (ati radeon x-something 1900-something), 2 gigs ocz ram pc-5400, asus p5w dh deluxe mb, heavy duty power supply (enermax 660 watt), xp pro... yada yada.... and was pullin my hair out tryin to figure out why the h-e-doublehockeysticks the bloody computer kept getting random freezes, most of the time getting the repeated skipping cd sound where you couldnt ctrl-alt-del or move the mouse... basically, power down and reboot. I went thru the registry, allowed permissions on everything... still had the problem. Updated all the drivers, removed pinnacle studio 9... still having problem. I was running at about 39 degrees celsius on the cpu temp, 38 degrees on the case/mb temp, but noticed that the ati card was runnin at 50 degrees... I had ordered a zalman gpu heatpipe/fan combo that I didnt install yet (wanted to ensure that the card was good before upgrading that fan). I installed the new heatpipe on the gpu and dropped down to 41 degrees. I was still having the problem... so I removed a dimm of ram and noticed that it said pc-5400, but when I had configured the bios, I had it set to pc-6400. So after calling up microsoft, reactivating windows (removing the stick of ram appeared to be a major hardware change which made me reactivate), I set the bios to the right ram speed, and wham! no more problems... I was capturing video from tv, I opened visio, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, imageready, outlook, word, excel, proshow gold, studio 9, musicmatch, windows media player, ulead dvd movie factory, nero... all at once... no freeze up. If I tried to just capture video and open one program, the computer would freeze. I know that the front side bus speed and the numbers corresponding to the ram speeds can be easily confused... I hope this helps someone from calling "geeks on call".