ATI Catalyst 9.2 issues?..help! grrrr

Yo, anyone have issues with the latest drivers? For some weird reason starting games at times causes my screen to go black, windows still going on, but nothing visible. Is this a driver bug? Something else?

I'm kind of lost on this. I am going to install older drivers tonight, but at least my PC works again. A few hours ago it didn't even boot properly, got stuck in the black screen thing. Windows XP seemed to boot fine, but I couldn't see a thing. Luckily Windows XP did it's notorious scandisk stuff, checking the indexing and what not. At first I thought it's a hard disk issue, but it doesn't seem to be that either.

My graphics card is a AMD ATI HD2900XT. Had it for a long time, never caused any issues. Same is true for my monitor, which can't be the issue as it's happening with my other monitors as well.

Anyone got a clue? It seems my 3D card magically 'forgets' it needs to send output to whatever monitor connected.

To make things even stranger, running 3D gamestudio is working great. Starting Day of Defeat Source or Telltale's Texas Hold'um cause a black screen crash.

No one?

Anyone has an idea whether it's my hard disk or perhaps my 3d card, what's the most likely cause? Drivers don't seem to matter much, in fact installing certain versions causes a crash.

You have GPU Problems. You sure the extra power cables are fit, power supply is capable of running all of it, and is your card secured?

It seems the GPU isn't getting enough power.

Hmmm, that's another possibility. Thanks.

Still a bit strange that when booting it sometimes doesn't find my hard disk, or does that make sense when there's a power shortage? I guess it's possible, Windows tends to go haywire when it needs to boot a little bit too often.

I will do a Google search, but do you happen to know of a tool that's able to measure the output of my power supply or somehow check if it's still alright?

My graphics card is secured, rock solid with several screws, it's going nowhere. It looks rather clean as well, no excessive dust bowls in the fan or things like that either. Overall my PC is quite dusty, but I did clean it up a bit with a vacuum cleaner now.

The main problem is still the same though, it will crash while trying to perform the more demanding tasks, like playing 3D games.

My power supply is a 750Watt by the way, worked fine for many months. It could of course be worn down now or even broken. As I type this, my PC has only crashed once today.

It seems my system reboots the moment the fan on my 3D card is starting to go faster... does that mean my power supply is dying? Or my 3d card?

Cheers

It means you either have the extra power cables incorrectly put or your power supply dies.

Get more power. I think 600+ is the way to go nowdays, I have 850W dual heatpipe myself. I had similiar issues when I first time overclocked my GPU. Apparently the power cables weren't on perfectly.

EDIT: Another possibility is also overheating. Try benchmarking your GPU. Get monitors and make it do something. If the heat goes well over 80 celsius easily, it's overheating.

Thanks for your response, I appreciate it! I will check the cables one more time and if the fans are clear.

Yeah, overheating is definitely possible, but somehow seems unlikely. Whenever the 3D card is running without the fan blowing at higher or the highest speed, there are no problems.

With a cold system, just booted up and the first thing I try do is play a game, it will crash immediately (when the fan starts spinning faster). You'd expect to at least have some time before overheating would cause the system to crash. I'd expect a few ATI related errors or messages as well in that case, but temperatures seem to stay normal.

The computer shows no signs of issues at all as long as I do not play games, no graphics artifacts in Windows or other programs.

I'm probably going to try to get a new power supply, either the same model but something bigger like a 1000W.

Update
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Seems it's not my power supply causing this. I bought a new one, 1000Watt and it still has the same issue.

Whenever I try to run games or more demanding things, it will crash eventually. I can surf the web for hours without ever crashing once though.

So what's next on the list? Bad RAM memory, 3d card or bad motherboard??? Bad motherboard seems very unlikely don't you think?

Temperatures are all normal, nothing is overclocked, voltages are fine and all ram sticks seems to be recognized just fine.

There are currently no graphical errors running Windows normally, although a few days ago it did display weird graphical errors in Photoshop. That seems to be gone now, perhaps because of a recent driver update.

Whenever the PC reaches a certain load, it will make the screen go black and eventually it will crash.

What the heck could be causing this?

edit: Ahh, sometimes when rebooting, it does make beeping sounds a bit longer than normal. Seems to be the usual graphics card beep (1 long, 3 short, 2 short). But... running 3d programs or games isn't an issue as long as I do not go full screen (that will cause my video card's fan to blow at full speed, causing a crash so it seems).

check your ram.. maybe remove one of the ram module and than the other and see what happens?

Thanks I will do.

any news?

Thanks, unfortunately nope, no news. I am going to send my PC away and let them run some tests. Hopefully it's something inexpensive.

It seems so far a broken 3d card seems the most likely cause.

RAM is not the issue, processor is fine, power supply works fine, hard disks are working better than ever... the beeps when booting after the crash seems to indicate a video card issue.

I can't rule out two other things though. One of them being a broken motherboard, the other being a driver/software/Windows XP issue.

Yup, theoretically it could be a driver issue, apparently ATI cards have suffered from something similar to this sometime in 2007.

But it would hardly make sense in my case as I have been using 8.2 drivers and newer drivers for many many months.

Cheers

Update: My PC has been working fine for a good couple of hours now. Perhaps it was the power supply after all.

good to hear that

FYI; If you're still on AGP, ATI just released the AGP Patch officially:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

Thanks old_bill, I appreciate your response! But nope I am on PCI Express.

It may very well have been a driver/software issue though, God knows how often I've did a reinstall. Apparently sometimes it works, sometimes it may fail for some reason or another.

I am not running 9.2 at the moment... I think. I'm going to stick with the new power supply though.

Oh, by the way, two other suspicious facts... both Windows XP and Valve's Source engine had updates released late yesterday. It may have solved my mysterious issue. For all I know it could have been caused by an update preceding yesterday's.

(for the case that it doesn't continue to work properly)

Hi PHeMox,

I recently had very similar issues on my system (grafics: msi geforce 7900Gs). Problems sometimes vanished for a few days and returned then anew. At last nothing woorked anymore. I bought another grafics card in the end, but it wasn't the card, but the pciExpress on the mainboard that didn't work properly so I also bought a new mainboard (pwoer wasn't the problem). However I did a lot of researches as I had grafic problems with the new system as well at first:

1: Have you CCC installed and vpu recover activated? I had black screen when beginning to play grafic intensive games, however when activating vpu recover the grafic device will be reset and the game closed with an error (that's better than a complete crash). I could solve this issue by downclocking the grafic clock. That's not that nice but you could give it a try (you can use the CCC for that). First try it with a high amount (-100Mhz) when it works you can find the highest clock that works correctly (in my case that are -30Mhz, as the card is overclocked by company by 80Mhz that's not as bad).
2: Try another PCIE card for checking whether it's a mainboard problem.
3: If your ATI-card isn't published by ATI itself but by another company (ASUS, SAPPHIRE,MSI,...) go to their sites and check whether they have their own drivers (at least ASUS has them). That's important because different companies may build in different cooling systems on the card that might don't run properly with the native ati drivers.

Thanks.



In case it fails again, that'll be the first thing I will do. I am quite confident my 3D card is not broken. If it fails again then I pretty much ruled out the power supply...

You know, it wouldn't really surprise me if it's something funky with my mainboard, but temperatures seem to be within normal range all the time.

Okey, it's getting funny now... seems it might just be an issue with the Source engine. Probably has something to do with refresh rates and what it defaults to. I pretty much ruled out faulty hardware.

So.. it seems I have wasted 200 bucks on a power supply, but I might as well keep it now for a future upgrade.

And just when you think everything is fine again, it stops working yet again! :p

I've now swapped out my 3d cards (old x1600xt and new hd2900xt), but despite not being able to fit my hd2900xt in the second slot because of a new hard disk ... I have found out none of the two 3D cards actually start spinning their fans now.

Meaning a dangerously hot x1600xt 3d card. Also meaning, my 3D card is not broken. Which makes sense as it ran Crysis a few days back after the issue started for more than 3 hours without ever failing.

Seems my mainboard, something I did not hope for, is the culprit after all! :S

Cheers