Hi there!

On my search for the 9600 pro freeze problem I found this thread and some info here helped me a little.
My System:
Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton)
MSI KT6-Delta FISR (VIA KT600 Chipset)
1 GB RAM
9600 Pro 128 MB (Hercules)
Soundblaster Live! Player 1024
Logitech Wheel Mouse optical (on PS/2 connector)
Windows XP Pro SP1a
DirectX9.0b

I tried Catalyst 3.4 (by Hercules) and 3.8 (by ATI), and the only thing changed was that at 3.4 the system totally freezed and at 3.8 the VPU Recover saved me from rebooting, but the problem itself wasn't solved.
I tried the following games which all freezed up:
Splinter Cell, NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, Max Payne 2, NFS: Underground (Demo)

On my system the "not moving the mouse" issue helps. When I don't touch the mouse while running one of these games (Max Payne 2 and Splinter Cell can't be played then though) it works fine!

I hope these info helps a little to solve the problem soon.

Ok I benchmarked with and without VIA drivers. Without them theres a drop of about 7 fps. But the system was more stable, and the graphics were less glitchy. Thanks.

thats odd, usually motherboard drivers make your computer more stable with newer AGP and PCI drivers.

Greetings everybody!
First i'd like to say thanx for all of you who spent the time to post suitable solutions concerning radeon9600pro, you helped solve my problem. Here's what did it for me, please check:

My hardware:
Athlon xp 1500+
2x 256 ddr400 ram (to enable dual ddr channel)
epox 8rda (nforce chipset)
"default" Radeon 9600pro
Software: winxp sp1, dx 9.0b, latest nforce drivers, latest bios, catalyst 3.8

With this setup I had random freezes with just about any game, very few of them worked, then again some of those froze too after some time. Then i started studying the abundance of reading material on this page and tried older catalyst drivers: 3.4, 3.5 and 3.7 made no difference, with 3.6 i didn't even get to windows. So i loaded catalyst 3.8 and dropped the agp from 8x to 4x in bios and also in the control panel, fastwrite off. All the installed games worked, and i play a lot of them; all but one - contract JACK (the new nolf2). Neither the demo nor the full game worked, it froze the system seconds after accessing the options menu (moving the mouse did it... i have logitech mouseman and microsoft internet keyboard pro both on usb), so i had to check my problem as "still unresolved".
I went back to research and was shocked you guys filled this forum with twice as much posts as before, most of them useless... For those of you who did nothing but complain, it will get you nowhere; this is hardwareanalysis and intended to resolve problems, not bitch about company such as ati. For those who keep trying to help: keep up the good work, all my thanx goes to you!
To make the story short, i did the smartgart trick (the shortcut in "program files/ ati technologies/ati control panel" folder), setting the *elusive* fastwrite off, rebooted, waited for the tests to finish, and finally i got to play the game contract JACK. Whether or not i get any more freeze-ups in the future, i still have the options you guys suggested which i HAVEN'T changed (yet): agp voltage 1.8v, pnp os off, application preferences off, deinstalling the control panel... but i have a good feeling i won't have to do that.

Once again, thank you all for the help, i'm sure you're helping lots of other readers that don't stand out and post a reply saying thanx, keep that in mind the next time you start doubting whether it's worth posting or not - everything helps! After all - you're doing what ATI and motherboard companies all over the world should do to prevent this problems from happening... the incompatibility with radeon and motherboard's agp. And a big NO to all of those who shouted things like "never buying ati card again", that's just plain stupid - you're forgetting the biggest issue about your radeon 9600pro - it's damn cheap. Its low price is the only reason this forum topic got this big - we all want THIS card to work. This card is half the price of 9800pro! True, it's bad coincidence that the developers "forgot" to run few tests and see what happened... but for this price, i was willing to find the solution by any means necessary, not giving up like many of the others in this forum (not blaiming them considering they must be underaged, hehe). I'm still ready and prepared to find solutions for any piece of hardware in the future, if i benefit from the price this much. After all, you have nothing to lose except some time and nerves, but it's nothing compared to experience you get!

Enjoy the games, and watch more tv!

Stinger

glad that helped for you but it didnt help a lot of us. Yeah this is probably the most helpful thread on the net of the 9600 problems, some of us have fixed their problems but some still havnt so we gotta keep bitchin about the company because theres still a hellalot of people with driver issues which IS the companies fault. Don't get me wrong, i still love ATI but theyre still not 100% in the driver catagory to me.

I can tell you one thing... For me this card is far from cheap. As far as say a million miles...

Maybe in the US the card maybe "cheap" (in terms of price ;-P) but its very expensive here and it better damn well work...

Well I did mean "cheap" compared with other high-end graphic cards

Stinger

hi guys,

Question to Jack, or No clue, When you turned off app preference what settings did you have aa af set toin both open gl and direct3d? also what mode were you running cs in? opengl or direct 3d?
and i tested this (app preference off) quickly the other day but still got a crash, it did however take more mouse moving then normall, perhaps you guys just didnt move the mouse around enough, go to the vid menu and make like you are about to change resolution, lemmy know if it locks up still.. also ill fool around with the settings you recommended some more tomorrow, thanks guys

I agree with the others in that drivers have made no difference. The difference the newer drivers make is that its easier to switch SMARTGART/FastWrite off and AGP speed to 4x. I'm currently testing the modified 3.2 drivers and there is no way to change the AGP speed with these and you have to access SMARTGART through the separate application and not through display properties. I've had to use the registry settings I gave before along with Powerstrip, so as I'm getting the same problems with 3.2 I can't really endorse them because they make tweaking more difficult.

I need to do a bit more testing because after I swithed the on-board audio to disabled from auto (I have a SBLive), installed the latest Intel chipset drivers and dumped my quake3 config/autoexec I was able to play Q3 in single player and play OpenGL JDoom with no problem. When I tried to connect to a server with Urban Terror (Quake3 counterstrike-like mod) I was dumped back to the desktop with a loss of bit depth. This is an improvement over the system freezing I was getting but I'll come back here with the results if I gain anything from my tinkering

HW: P4P800 (i865), 2x256mb PC3200, P4-2.4C, Club3D 9600Pro 400/600, SBLive, Maxtor 60GBHD, USB Mouse and KB.

Hi,
Seen all the helpful postings but I'm still having trouble.
My system specs are....
Windows XP
XP2800
Tyan Tachyon Radeon G9600PRO 8xAGP 128MB DDR VGA/DVI/S-
Epox 8KRA2+ SKT A KT600 8X AGP ATX 133/SA
512MB

Games that don't load inc. Delta Force BHDown, BF1942, UT2003, NHL2003
Games that do.........MOH, Chaser, SOF II

The card is set at current bus 8x? How can I change this if I have too?

Any help you can give would be very much appreciated as I'm going spare!!
Thanks
Seb

my aa af settings were set to the lowest slide but ya it didnt really work for me either, CS crashed in like 10 seconds but atleast i played that much... before it wouldnt even load up.

I've got the same problem with ati 9600 pro BBA
i've got this machine:

amd xp 2000+
msi kt3 ultra 2 kt333
512 ddr 333 kingston
ati radeon 9600 pro bba
win xp + sp1

in "some" games, when i'm in the game, if i try to move the mouse, the game suddenly hangs up and i have to reboot my pc.
I've found a solution to this problem (returning to catalyst 3.5)
Everything seems to work fine
but my video's performance, has lowered about a 30% (i tested it in a game and my fps lowered from 270 to 220)
if anyone knows how to solve this problem with catalyst 3.9 please let me know
well, that's all i have to say

Want to play CS, or DOD but cant? this may be for you ---->
heres a workaround for anyone who gets the mouse freeze but wants to play a halflife mod through steam..

first, go to your games menu in steam, right click on the mod your want to run, click on properties, then click launch options, in that text box type -software.. now the game will start up in software mode (only temporary) now go through the options setting everything as you like it(make sure to click on advanced and change the buy menus to the old style, that way there's no mouse movement to buy s**t) and once you've got all the other options set your video back to opengl 1024-768 or whatever you use, now don't use your mouse.. instead quit the game using the keyboard type ` (for the console) then type quit, now it should quit and save your settings.. now to join multiplayer games open up steam, but not the games menu, instead open up the servers menu right from windows, now join whatever server you want and when you get in just don't move your mouse when the game isn't in fully 3d mode.. like to pick your team don't move your mouse, use the 1, 2 or 5 keys, same with picking class..
presto, your in game with no crash, and now you can move the mouse all you want in game (when in first person shooter, or spectator, or map mode) with no crashes just make sure to use the keyboard for any menu's, hope that helps people

RADEON 9600 PRO FREEZES EVEN IN LINUX:

Well I spent a few days installing SuSE Linux 9.0 Professional and then installed the Radeon drivers (latest FireGL/Radeon drivers not Catalyst since they're Windows only). Pretty cool...smooth in OpenGL mode. Certainly makes you feel optimistic about the future of gaming on Linux.

Except...after playing a few minutes of any game, It freezes in the same way it does in Windows 2000. So now I believe this is just a pure hardware issue....I can't believe it to be anything else. I mean, Linux has completely different driver architecture to windows and doesn't have ATI's control panel etc.

Even though my Windows 2000 works with Cat 3.2's, I still think it's hardware because I read somewhere that ATI didn't implement full functionality for the 9800/9600 series until Cat 3.5's.

Also, I don't believe this problem is a systematic one (i.e. not due to ATI's technology) but rather a set of problems that all have the same symptoms.

Crazy

Well I still get crashs everyonce in a while, dont play CS any more so I could not tell you check out this picture, no wonder it sux.

http://server3.uploadit.org/files/161103-komusa_1763_1317899.jpg

No clue nice pic, lol, well i'm not as concerned about the card being made in iraq, what makes me wonder is the tag line they display on the box "game buster"

looks like the card lived up to their marketing hype.... after all it did bust half my games. heh

on a truly bizarre note, i figured out what fixed my sound crackling problem, though it makes no sense what so ever... when i un-installed the anti-virus/firewall software that came with my net connection (telus freedom anti-virus) my sound crackling returned.. i tried several different firewall/antivirus programs on the odd chance that they would also solve the problem (since freedom is a terrible program and any alternative would be better) but the sound was still horrible... i reinstalled freedom and the sound was back to perfect... makes no damn sense to me, can anyone else make sense out of that?

LMAO yeah saw that, way too funny..good to "hear" your sound prob is fixed...cant help you there though as to why, but anyway I have seen on another forum, that there was a new cat 3.9 that may have addressed some gaming issues as of 11-10-03, I have not downloaded it yet and checked it out, nor do I know the validly of it so download at your own risk..heres the link anyways.
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/wxp-w2k...28m-011775c.exe

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/wxp-w2k-wme-catalyst-aiw-ogl-7-95-...11775c.exe this is the correct link sorry to dbl post on this already huge thread

Hi all,
having the same problems with aiw 9600 pro "freezes up on all games".after reading many of the posts i've seen several recomendations If any one has a brief list of some I would appreciate it....
amd athlon 1.3
asus a7a266 mobo
512mb ddr
Thanks

Joe, try using No Clue driver's, they worked 4 me