x1300 on way out? Or time for a reinstall?

[uberlad]

About three months ago I grabbed an X1300 to replacethe 9550 in my HTPC. It's never been wholly happy, occasionally blanking the screen and crashing when initialising the Windows drivers and occasionally firing off GPU recover when using Windows. I thought the problems were due to the reasonably long-installed instatlation of Windows Media Centre.

Recently, however, the card has got worse. First it started to crash the machine during Divx. The screen would freeze and after about 10 seconds more sound the machine would lock up or reboot. It was completely random; some videos would be fine, some would crash it three times in a row and then be fine again on time four.

Since I got home yesterday Windows will boot, start to load everything in startup and then the screen goes black. Sometimes it sits there, still chugging the HD, and sometimes it just reboots the machine.

I have three choices:

1. Decide the card is bunk and contact HiS about a replacement (or try and get an RMA from Scan on a product I bought months ago <shudder>)

2. Decide that the Media Centre Install is bunk and scrub it (many many hours of updates and configuration ahoy!)

3. Decidee that media centre is bunk and I may as well see how the Vista Beta does as a Media Centre until I reinstall it.

thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated. I might try swapping my gfx card from upstairs in this evening to narrow down the problem area.

Uberlad

[Dr Mordrid]

One of my AIW x600 PCIe's is acting that way in multiple bootups, meaning it's not a screwed OS etc. I either end up with a black screen/frozen computer, multicolor screen/frozen computer or it recovers (10% of the time). Timing is erratic; sometimes every 10 min., sometimes an hour or more.

My plan is to re-flash its BIOS, open the case then clean the contacts, install some VRAM heatsinks and blow any dust out of the GPU fan. System BIOS has already been re-flashed. Case & CPU temps are low..

If that fails I'll put a big, round, orange sticker on it & head to the rifle range

[uberlad]

I might try RMA before I try NRA.

The annoying thing is because it's a X1300 that's overclocked by default by HiS I dunno if it's the overclock that's causing it to overheat. The fan has plenty of cool air to suck in, I even tried opening the side and blowing a desk fan into the IceQ intake.

Hopefully it is just a badly seated card being affected by the temps (hottest it's been since getting the card) and being swapped out into my upstairs machine will sort it out.

It's just packed in a antec aria case which takes a good long time to dismantle enough to get a card out of.

Tried a new BIOS on the machine. there appear to be no settings in the BIOS for AGP setting, which is a little odd.

Uberlad

[GNEP]

Yeah if the problems with the card start getting worse in July, it's a fair bet that it's heat related... had similar problems with one of my systems recently, then realised that I hadn't drained the watercooling circuit in nearly 2 years of just about 24/7 running... done that now and it's running flawlessly again (this is a watercooled Parhelia...)

[dZeus]

try underclocking the card

[uberlad]

I tried undercloking it to standard speeds before it got this bad. Seemed to not affect the divx problem at the time. Possibly I wasn't dropping it enough.

What tool can I install that will underclock the card on bootup, though? Possibly running the card at 800x600 will not stress it unduly and allow me to install a tool to underclock it.

Can I make ATiTool run it up at low speed?

I hope that the cooling is ok - it's got an Arctic Cooling cooler than increases it to two slots wide but it may well not touch the memory.

I shall hopefully find out more when I swap them over this evo.

Uberlad

[Dr Mordrid]

That particular AIW is out of warranty, so NRA is a distinct option

[uberlad]

Hmmm.

The TV box now has a 9800 in it and is displaying exactly the same symptoms - as soon as Windows kicks a driver into high gear (any res over about 1024x768) it locks the machine and will normally cause a reboot.

I declare Windows (or the machine, I hope windows) stuffed and I'm moving everything off the primary drive in preparation for reinstall.

The X1300 is now upstairs and apart from some horrendous issues with me forgetting to delete the old gfx card first (you'd think drivers would be clever enough by now) and the fact that its fan seems to be louder than the 9800 it is not displaying any flakiness.

hopefully a clean out of the driver upstairs will put it back to working. Wish there wasn't 75Gb to move off the primary drive downstairs. Time for a partitioning I believe.

I might install Vista on the TV box whilst it's out of commission - kill two birds with one stone whilst the lady is away for the week.

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Vista, eh? Beta, eh? It seems to stay up for about ten minutes before going horribly wrong. It also has no idea what the SPDIF plug on the onboard sound is for yet. I'll leave it to brew a little longer before trying it in a critical TV role methinks.

I'll put Media Centre back on it tonight and if it still crashes then I'm going to have to accept that something in the machine hardware apart from the gfx card has gone screwy.

There is a possibility that the power supply is overheating and mangling everything I suppose. Although the Aria case is never going to fit a larger power supply - I'd have to build a power supply into the TV cabinet and run the cables in through a new hole in the back of the case. It would massively increase airflow as well...........hmmmm.

I'd better run memcheck as well while I'm at it.

Updates as they happen

Uberlad

[uberlad]

I think I've narrowed it down to something that the ATi drivers do.

Windows installs perfefctly, everything else installs ok. Sounds, network, TV cards, motherboard all perfect

I install Catalyst 6.6, it reboots the machine as it's supposed to.

windows pops up, drives chug, screen flicks to black as it resets the gfx card once. then it flicks to black again and doesn't come back.

Thinking about it I might have installed a new firmware for the motherboard, but I can't remember if it was before or after it started going really screwy. If the motherboard AGP handling has gone bad for some reason and the ATi drivers are switching the card into a faster AGP handling mode (switching on fast writes etc) that could cause the problem I'm seeing.

It also explains why putting the 9800 in caused exactly the same problems.

Firmware flashing ahoy methinks. Followed by highly experimental XP -> Media Center conversion surgery.

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Who knows what's up with the stupid thing. Not installing Catalyst control Centre has it working at least, but I have no idea if it's any more stable than it was before it went totally wobbly.

In better news the XP to Media Centre conversion worked like a charm.

Uberlad