windows Graphics card issue

[Saizou]

I've been having this problem for about month and a half now, everytime I play a game on PC the game suddenly freezes up and I get this message from CCC: "VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands" which breaks the game for about 30 seconds if I manage to spam ctrl-alt-del on time or completely crashes the computer. Sometimes it directly locks up and monitor starts behaving as if nothing was connected to it, or graphics just die leaving the rest of the computer running (it has happened that I managed to get out of ET and shut down computer without seeing what I was doing). Or any of the previous combined. I'm pretty sure it's not the drivers since I tried dozens of them and it's not overheating as CCC displays 54-55C right after that happens, and it's not PSU as I was running that same card with same PSU on different motherboard before without any issues. From searching the internet it seems the problem is quite known but noone has found any general solution that would work, at least they didn't work in my case. The only thing right now that comes to my mind is that either the motherboard AGP slot is faulty or the card itself is faulty, and either option doesn't bode well. So before I start tearing the computer down I was wandering if anyone had the same problem with any of the ATI cards and if and how did they fix it.

 

It's really a game breaker as you aren't sure when it's gonna come (in COD4 it comes after 5-10 minutes, 30 if I'm lucky, ET is also lottery, and it even happens on a game from 2001, basically it is fairly random)

CPU: P4 3.2GHZ w/Hyperthreading

GPU: Sapphire HD4650 AGP 1GB DDR2

RAM: 2GB

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-8IPE775-G Socket 775 865PE AGP

OS: Win XP SP3

 

Any thought are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[daredevil]

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=103165

 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=100973&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

[Saizou]

I'll try this ASAP and let you know.

[FinZeroX]

Yep, had the same problem with ATI Radeon 9800XT

It just freezed, went black and monitor said: "No signal detected".

Solution: A new GC

[Saizou]

Yep, had the same problem with ATI Radeon 9800XT

It just freezed, went black and monitor said: "No signal detected".

Solution: A new GC

I'm not giving up yet. Ran in a bit of a trouble with setting up RivaTurner to work with my graphics card but I pulled it off in the end.

All set and ready to go. Testing time.

 

Update: still having the issue but it seems less often now, at least on COD. ET is yet to be tested.

[SkyeDarkhawk]

Have you tried underclocking your videocard?

[JoeDirt]

Install only driver without ccc

[Saizou]

Removed CCC and tried underclocking and it still freezes up at some point in time. Tried whole spectrum of core frequencies (from 540, default 600 and up to maximum 750) to no avail. I'll try doing fresh reinstall (completely removing any ATI stuff remaining and go only with the driver). Tried with ATI Tray Tools and still got the same results. RivaTuner solution manages to postpone the freeze but it freezes up sooner or later, even on ET. If the fresh install doesn't fix it I think then it's time to replace the card.

[AntiThought]

I had an issue very similar to this. In my case the GPU was going bad and overheating. I made my PC playable for another 2 weeks before the card completely failed by removing the side of the case and sticking a big fan in the gap to improve airflow and reduce heat.

[Saizou]

It's still freezing up, I guess I will stick to CCC+RivaTurner solution as it gives me a chance to actually recover from it when it hits and seems to prolong it. I've read about cases where the same thing is caused by overheating as the guy had a wire stuck in his fan, though I think it's not the case here. Last ditch effort is going to be cleaning the contacts and reslotting the card.

[Term!n@tor]

Last ditch effort is going to be cleaning the contacts and reslotting the card.

lol you should have done this first. see if you can get gpu temperatures, there is a utility called hwmonitor, which gives temperatures in critical areas. cpu, cores, gpu, mobo etc, it reads the sensor data if you have them.

Edited September 28, 2010 by Term!n@tor

[Saizou]

First off, sorry for reviving an old thread but maybe this epilogue will help some poor soul that has run into same problem.

 

So after taking the card to the store they concluded that it's fine (they tested with 3D mark 2006, 60 passes and it was ok). Brought it back and tested it myself with 3D mark and it went well. Stress tested the CPU and GPU and it went fine. Did Memtest86 on RAMs and it also went fine, same as the GPU memory test. The problem was still there so I decided for the last option: new motherboard. I replaced it today with ASRock 775Dual-VSTA, repaired windows, installed the newest Sapphire drivers for this card I could find and went to test it on COD4 (for some reason it crashed most often on TDM) played about 45 minutes and it survived. Somehow during OS repairing COD stats got messed up and even with the backed up players folder it failed to return the old stats (which is no big deal). In the end only thing that comes to my mind is that it was some compatibility issue (either software or hardware). So far so good, but I'll have to play longer to tell for certain if it is really fixed.

[NoGooD]

Thanks for the update Saizou. Play some more and let us know if you have that issue reoccurring again. It may very well have been a hardware conflict or bad motherboard drivers for the PCI-e controller.

[Saizou]

Seems it's alright now, not a single crash in 3 days, and there would have been at least dozen crashes by now. It's an AGP board (as the card is AGP) but I'd say it's either the driver conflict or defective motherboard (it was used after all, but there was no visible damage and it worked fine when I used an older AGP card). So besides that I can't give a certain conclusion on what the issue really was.

 

Anyway, case closed and continuing happily.