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.

Sounds like a job for Registry Editor/Fix.
My moneys on registry conflicts for most of u guys.
Get a Reg cleaner and get rid of all old VGA registries.
Also be sure to delete folders after uniinstalling older ver.Drivers and Cat software.
Oh ya and stop overclocking soon as you pull out the BOX (circuits need to be warmed up and set)
wait a couple days before Cranking the Juice.
I had the same probs.
Now alls EASY PEASY

Oh yah i also Hardwired my fan to its own power supply cable.(splice).
to fix my voltage issue.

ive had enough of this problem now. ive sold my 9800 xt and am buying a 9800 pro tomorrow.
i really hope i dont have the same problem with that.

Me too... i've tried ALL POSSIBLE in the last 3days, so there are only two thinks that can cause it:
-not compatibile MB
-the card is damaged

Iam sending it back for exchange with geforce

Hi everyone,
Just thought I,d put my 2 cents in here since I too am having the same problem. In XP I am getting lockups or shutdowns in games such as vice city and counterstrike. Very rarely will the comp glitch when doing something other than games. I switched my card for a new one with no luck. I tried a fresh wipe, no go. I tried windows 98, thinking that the drivers were unstable in XP... NO GO. I did lower my agp speed to 1x which stopped the glitching in vice city, but not in other games and apps. I tried an nvidia fx 5200 32mb in my comp thinking maybe my mboard was cooked... nvidia card worked mint! I think the problem is incompatability with some mboards and also junk drivers from ATI. Im going back to nvidia soon if i cant figure this out. Im gonna switch boards and ram this week so if this fixes the prob I'll let you guys know.
ATI RAEDON 9000 PRO 128MB
AMD XP 2600+
512MB RAM
AOPEN AK-77 8XN

http://www.squeakfix.co.uk/fixes/crashing.html

Here are listed all the common problems and how to try fix them, if it doesn't help the card is prolly damaged.

guys i need help
whatever problem you guys are having with the 9800XT,i have it all
has anyone here found a solution
when i run on 8X my screen went blank n lockup,but when i switch to 4X it runs really stable

my spec is:
AMD +2200(1.85)
Gigabyte Mobo GA-7VAXP
Corsair 512DDR PC3200(400Mhz)
Asus Radeon 9800XT
Antec 480w

how do i make it run at 8X????

I run perfectly at AGP8X / Fast Writes enabled. It does seem to run perfectly on Intel 875P motherboards. I think it's more software related. Run AGP4X until updated drivers come for your motherboard chipsets.

I got this problem too. want to take card back but I have a feeling the Internet company who sold it and Connect3D are going to fit tooth and nail for it to stay on my computer room floor. Upgraded to new cpu and motherboard and shelled out on new radeon xt to replace my old radeon 7200. what a mistake.

MSI KTVAL motherboard
1 GB DDR 333mhx ram
Windows XP
Sony DRU-A DVD burner
Panasonic dvd payer
sounds blaster live
Amd 3000+ at 166mhz FSB

Appart from the fact that my Connect3D Radeon XT 256mb card is one duff product, I have managed to get windows to load up very slowly using catalyst 3.10, on a 256mb aperture (Bios), and uninstalling any IRQ devices which may conflict in port 11. Connect support have suggested that I uninstall all PCI cards and AGP driver before trying to reinstall the card. Of course, display crashes if I try to change resolution or even sneeze. what is this *&^% I have bought? Where is the fix, ATI??

Back to my old radeon now, with a £300 mistake on my computer room floor. anyone got any more suggestions on how to fix? Come to think of it, has ANYONE found a fix for this yet?

Nick

Well I've read through all your messages and have the following to share with you.

(To start with for all those that care, I DON'T have a antec PSU). I have an ASUS 9800XT and I never installed the drivers that came with the card on CD and downloaded the latest ASUS drivers and installed them. I did this because usually the drivers on CD are out of date, so I do this as standard practice with all new devices. I then had the same problems everyone is getting, whatever Direct3D game I run after a while it crashes, sometimes the VPU will catch the error and want to email ATI the error report (how many of you have emailed them the report, I'm now doing it every time I get it, hoping they will notice there is a problem), but mostly it just hangs the machine and sometimes reboots. Most frustrating. I installed the Catalyst 3.9 and Catalyst 3.10 (latest) and still problems.

I originally thought it was a heat issue, however I opened up the case and put a HUGE fan next to the whole PC whilst it was blowing very hard and there was no difference.

I did notice something interesting. If I leave my machine running all the time (i.e. overnight etc 24x7) then the games run longer before they crash (sometimes I can play for 2-3 hours), however if I switch my machine off overnight and then turn it on and go straight into a game they crash very quickly (2-30mins). This seems to indicate that temperature doesn't make a difference, since the card is relatively cold.

I am going to try and completely remove *all* catalyst drivers and install the drivers that came on the CD because quite a few people have mentioned that they work (I believe its version 7.93) and then just disable the SmartDoctor's voltage measurements.

I used to think my card was faulty, but reading how many people are having the same problem, specially with different card manufacturers I've changed my mind. Hopefully ATI / Asus will resolve the issue by releasing a driver (cat 3.11?) that will work reliably.

This is a SOFTWARE problem and also many of these problems are user errors, believe it or not Always make sure old drivers are COMPLETELY removed and you got all the latest drivers for everything in your computer. Also if you got a bunch of stuff in there, try disabling/uninstalling other devices, leaving only the 3d card to see if that helps. Often soundcards are troublesome and especially SB Live cards in some configurations. Before RMA, reinstall the OS completely with only graphicscard , install latest chipset drivers for mobo and latest drivers for graphics. If that does not help, you MAY have a faulty card.

About the Asus software, the SmartDoctor is VERY BUGGED ! I also know that an engineer from Tapai is coming to the UK next week to look into this very problem. This info is confirmed with Asus UK Tech guys. Just hold on a bit longer and everything will be fixed, at least whats SmartDoctor / Display driver is considered.

And with all AGP 4X/8X / Fast Writes / Crashing problems, mainly that is up to your mobo manufacturer to release proper drivers for your chipsets. I am running the Asus 9800XT at AGP8X / Fast Writes with no problems whatsoever (Intel 875P chipset with latest drivers). I am also running SmartDoctor 4.0 in the background to control the fan speed, but I do have error reporting disabled (Untick everything in voltage area, untick fan reading also and "disable error reporting when running 3d games) until they get this program sorted.

Thought I'd also add the fact that many people have mentioned lockups only whilst playing games. This is also true for me, except that I also get lockups when using the ASUS9800XT card for video input (i.e. watching my cable television in a window or fullscreen).

Horaay! My XT problems are fixed! Well...almost

My Card now works like a beaut. It was an IRQ conflict, as the motherboard was assigning it own USB controller to IRQ 11, sharing it with the AGP VGA card. If you have a motherboard which will allow you to dedicate an IRQ to the VGA card, then try it and see. I've had to find a workaround, as mine doesn't have this. I've allocated PCI slot 1 to IRQ port 11 and left it empty. Once I did that, it started working perfectly, although still has about 3 seconds of blank screen between windows loading and my user select page.

have more testing to be done, will be filling up PCI slots with sound blaster, USB hub, etc, one by one to how much it can take before failure, but there is a slight break in the clouds on the horizon. Only taken me 4 hours a night for the last week and about 50 reboots. but it ain't the card....

steer clear of omega drivers from omega corner personally.

cheers,

Nick

I am having this exact same problem on my box - crashing when running games, VPU recover butting in sometimes, reboots, looping sound etc etc.

My spec:
P4 2.8GHz (800FSB)
Abit IC7
1Gb Crucial DDR2700
Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro
D-Link DFE-530Tx NIC
Windows 2k
(decent 400W PSU, for those of that inclination!)

This is the second motherboard and second GPU I have tried (the first was a Radeon 9800), with numerous HDD formats, OS changes and clean reinstalls with different driver sets. Tried the card in an older machine and it seemed fine though. Similarly, tried a GeForce FX 5600 in my box and that ran fine aswell!

The problem is drivers or a hardware conflict: Going to try this IRQ thing next - sounds promising.

Mightly p**sed off with ATI though - at least the nVidia gear was stable. I'm this close to geting it swapped back, regardless of how fast the Radeon may be... I HOPE YOU ARE READING THIS THREAD, ATI!

I am a new forum member, and this will probably be my first and last post as well as probably not checking for replys either but i felt i had to post a reply here since this particular thread has been my saving grace after 6 months solid work for nothing.

I too have had the same problem with my system that i built from scratch:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8ST800
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz 533 FSB
RAM: 512Mb
VPU: Radeon 9800pro 128MB
PSU: JHT 350W power supply
OS: Win2k Prof SP4

For the last 6 months, i have had games like: CS 1.6, BF1942, Myst (URU) and even AOE 2 crash on me after only a few minutes playing. I can only describe this as the game freezing, the keyboard and mouse being unresponsive, and the sound repeating itself as if a CD is stuck. The only option was to hit the tit.

After trying everything, and i mean EVERYTHING (mostly involving every possible permutation of drivers for all devices) that has been mentioned previously on this thread only finding it makes little or no difference, the only thing that has helped has been to cool the graphics card down.
Follow this link to see a photo of the kind of set-up i had to do with fans in order to get the required result:
http://www.btinternet.com/~harveysharp/FansandVPU.JPG
This looked and sounded silly (not to mention being very cold in the vicinity!) but this worked perfectly.
I proved this to myself by trying to play a game with the fans off... (the computer crashed) ...switching the fans on... (played for an hour with no problems) ...switched the fans off while playing the same game... (only for the computer to crash again within about 5 minutes).

Hence the reason why i am now going to purchase a water-cooling system for my VPU and CPU followed by a snotty e-mail and letter to ATi for providing the general public with a card that has a tendancy to over-heat with possibly a link to these forums.

I hope this helps all those of you out there that have plugged away at this problem as long as I have, and also a big thanks for letting me know that there are people out there who care enough to post their successes and failures to let others have a better chance of fixing the problems!!!

IRQ thing it is indeed. I don't think I mentioned my whole solution before, but on reflection I found the following things to be most important in resolving my issue (screen goes blank and pc crashes after loading windows).

* Took out all cards apart from graphics card.
* Reinstalling windows as new on a formatted hard drive (yes, new HDD). The reason I did this is probably unrelated, but a re-install on the old one came up with an unresolvable error at the end of installing (why can't these things just work?!).
* I noticed after this re-install that windows had changed all of my IRQ's. Previously, it was limited to using only 1-11 IRQ, but now it was loading up things as PCI 12-22 slots as well, making enough space for the Radeon to live on it's own
* Downloaded cataylst driver 3.10. installed it
* Before rebooting system, I downloaded the SmartGart uninstaller and uninstalled the SmartGART feature. This is the feature that runs a check and crashes the computer on rebooting.
* Rebooted
* Reinstalled Catalyst over old one. Advanced settings should appear on the display properties. On SmartGART feature, move the setting from 8x to 4x. Turned off fast write. Turned off the OverDrive function.
* Rebooted
* It worked. Slowly but surely, install the other cards and software.

On most games, it's been working fine. had a couple crash probs with Unreal II (but reckon that's down to buggy software) and Mafia seems a bit buggered, but apart from that, it's a lean, mean kick-ass, albeit 4x AGP, machine...

I was having problems with crashing in games after a few minutes with my ATI RAEDON 9000 PRO and I could not find a solution until recently. It certainly doesnt apply to the ultra teckies but for some it may have been overlooked. My computer wouldnt POST on a restart so I asked my friend who works with computers to have a look. It seemed like the Mboard was faulty but after some investigation I found out that the JUMPER for my cpu clock speed was set to 133mhz amnd my Mboard supports 166mhz fsb so basically the machine was dragging its heel so to speak with a game running and it would kick me off. Just a thought!
ROBERT

To All Suffering Crashes with 9800---9800XT Cards

Try Installing Windows Me with the Latest ATI ME drivers and direct X 9 and all your Problems May
Go Away

And please let me know how you get on

Chris

The specific ASUS 9800XT problems with SmartDoctor, fans spinning down or completely halting etc are serious problems which needs to get fixed soon. Asus doesn't seem interested in fixing these issues so I decided to RMA my card which I did yesterday.