For the past year I’ve had nasty problems with my Radeon 8500 (64 MB) graphics card. USually, its more than powerful enough to run things, even the latest games, and they look decent - Im not that concerned with graphical excellence. However, with some games, the card doesn’t work quite right. It will crash, taking my PC down with it, usually, leaving nothing but a screwed up series of vertical line son the computer.
Now it did this with four games, thus far:
Simcity 4 (fixed by driver update)
Command & Conquer: Generals (fixed by optimizing card for game)
Max Payne 2 (never fixed, I used another PC)
and now Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (not fixed… yet)
Now, the first three, it would crash within a few seconds of starting the high-end graphics. SW: KotOR does not do this. Instead, it may have finally given me the peice of the puzzle I needed to fix this. KotOR, instead, crashed after hours of play, and then proceeded to get more and more frequent. I was very careful to leave anough time en between crashes to clear out any junk data, and the PC itself seemed to be fine.
So, now I’m thinking that the card itself is overheating. What do you think of my conclusion? If I’m right, how can I keep the card cool without investing in an expensive cooling system? I intend to buy a new card in a few months, anyway, but I’d like to use mine right now.
When you play video intensive games or other software that runs the CPU the temps do get much warmer. I used to run a distributed computing program and my temps went up 10-15 degrees. To rule out overheating of the CPU remove the side panel and point a small fan at the insides of the computer and then play the game and see if it overheats and crashes the machine. This is also a good time to blow out all of the accumulated dust that builds up inside. Is this a homebuilt machine or store bought? Is there a way for you to check the temperature in the BIOS? You can get fans for video cards if your doesn’t have one.
If you want a cheap answer, turn the case fan around so that it blows air in to the computer in stead of sucking it out. That may help you a lot with cooling without having to buy anything.
If you think it’s really heat, there are a few things you can do. Especially if you don’t care about noise. Here’re a few products I’ve used that work great.
There was a fan that fit into a drive bay slot. I have that one, but I can’t find it right now. Failing that, you can just pop one of the drive bay covers off to provide an intake for cool air.
What drivers are you running? Catalyst 3.8 implemented a feature called VPU Recover. If the videocard VPU crashes for whatever reason, it can be restarted by the drivers without the need to reboot the computer. I personally prefer the Omega drivers, which are optimized versions of the official drivers. If you want to stick with the official version, that’s fine, just grab the latest version from the ATI website.
You have an Athlon running at 2.7 Ghz?? :eek: No wonder you are having an over heating problem if you have it overclocked that high. The fastest stock AthlonXP’s are clocked in at 2.2 Ghz.
Unless of course it is actually a AthlonXP with a PR of 2700, which actually are clocked at 2.17Ghz. AMD uses the PR marketing scheme because at the same clockspeed Athlon processors are much faster than a Pentium 4 made by Intel.
Now if it is overheating, you may want to look into getting a larger heatsink and fan, or increasing airflow in the case with extra case fans. Or you can do the REALLY cheap and easy method, that I use when I overclock my AthlonXP 2000 - simply take the side of the case off.
