lockups + boot problems :/

I recently got a radeon 9700pro graphics card,. and now I'm experiancing lockups 5-15 minutes into playing games, this sint happen immediately after getting the card however, it seemed to crop up later and stay. Also when I restart my computer, or turn it on, the monitor often stays on standby and im not blessed with all the usual booting up sounds, so basically it doesnt start up, after a while of turning the power off, turning pc on it eventually starts up normally (can take dozens of tries through, or sometimes even just 1).

The lockups seem to happen mostly in 3d games.. including half-life, (well natural selection, a mod for it), medievil: total war (the big battles), and some others I forgot.

One of the first things I thought might be the problem was the really really lousy PSU I have in my computer... some 250watt one, I've ordered a new 550watt one which should be on its way in a few days, but until then I'd like to isolate any other possible causes.

my system is a mixture of old and new parts.. so a lot of it is crap... :
1.33ghz tbird
256mb ram
via kt266 mobo
radeon 9700

Another possible cause I thought might be overheating, and if so that situation has been made worse by me unplugging my extra exhaust and case fans in order to get the PC to boot up properly (it seemed to help in that department).
Before this card I had a horrible kyro 2, it didnt lockup like I'm currently getting however, so that does lead me to believe it may be more to do with power than overheating.

also maybe my ram has suddenly gone faulty? it would make sense if it had, at least to me as the timing of these problems cropping up isnt 100% consistent with what i would have thought.

oh one more thing, I am currently using the directx 9 and the new ati drivers that are made to work with it (most recent). but I have had these problems on the old drivers and old directx too.

well, if anyone has any suggestions as to what they think may be wrong and what I can do about it please say.

Is the motherboard 8x agp?

that would be my first guess that the 250 ps just isn't enough. That 9700 is a power hog.

mobo isnt 8x agp, reviews seem to say the card runs good on 4x anyway.

on the power thing, the new PSU arrived today, I tried to install it, i had all the bits plugged in right (as far as i know) and tried to start it up, it turned on for like 1 second and then stopped somtimes, othertimes i tried to turn it on it would just not do anything. I'm really clueless as to whats wrong, someone said something is shorting it.. but i dont see what can be.

I had a problem kinda like that. I would turn in the pc it would run for like 2 or 3 secs and then turn off. I thought I had some bad ram. So I RMA'd the memory and got the new stuff in and it did the same thing. So I took the cpu off and pull the cpu out and put it all back in. Well when I put it in this time I plugged the hsf fan to a different spot and boom it all works now. It really pissed me off cause I went without my pc for like 1 week.

well I sure wish someone knew what might be going wrong with the PSU i bought... maybe i should make a new topic about it. It just refuses to power up properly :/

[Prometheus]

Im pretty diapointed with Radeon performance lately

I got a 9000 in Sept havent had good Morrowind grapihics the water is pure silver.....

NExt card i buy will b a geoforce

oh morrowind looks VERY sexy for me, well at least it did until i can no longer play that game due to my comp going broken.


maybe you should try some more recent drivers? sure the water is meant to look silvery... but its meant to have motion. There are some screenies of i took in morrowind here: http://members.lycos.co.uk/wookiehouse/

http://members.lycos.co.uk/wookiehouse/rain.JPG shows water under rainy conditions, and a few others there show some water too.

I think the problem is obvious. No lockups/problems before ATI so it's clearly the card.

I'm not surprised... a majority of ATI owners experience the same problem no matter what system they are used in. Just do a search on any search engine and you will see this is widespread. ATI continues to sell sub-standard products and why people continune to fall for it is beyond me. Great PR spin I guess.

But hey, as AI mentioned, if you want great benchmarks, go with ATI. But if you want both quality and reliability, go with nVidia.

but the thing is, it worked fine until recently (ie 1-2 weeks ago)
and i recieved it roughly around the date 21/09/2002 so that would mean like 2 months of faithful service until now... previously i thought this was less but looking at the order date I can see it was longer than i first thought. still, im confused, very.