Major PC problems! Need help.

[U.S.Amateurfilmaker]

I just submitted this same question to another forum i'm on, and I want to get as many opinions as possible, so I'll just copy and paste it here...

I posted a thread a week or two ago about the fact that my Radeon 9800 Pro keeps resetting itself. Well, I have loaded the new drivers with no luck, the computer is still screwing up. If anything it's even worse now. A few days ago I was working on editing a video for a project I was doing, and during playback the computer just froze, and by frozen I mean 100%, and the sound from the video was even stuck on one point (almost like the sound you get if you pull a sega genesis cartridge out of the system if anyone knows what im talking about)

I kept my cool and restarted, then I finally finished editing and went to burn the final product on DVD, and the computer locked up once again during the burn. Then today, the graphics card reset itself again, also once again citing "non-responsiveness to system commands" as the issue. LAter, I put my PC into hibernate mode, and when I "woke it up" a few hours later, no applications would launch, and the one that did froze immediately. Upon my attempt to ctrl-alt-del it, the comp froze for 5 sec, then came back, and did the same over and over everytime I tried to end the task.

I'm getting the feeling that even if I reformat totally it isn't gonna help. I personally think it's a hardware failure, possible even the MOBO, or at least the Radeon. I'm basing this off of the fact that a started to get occasional freezes 6 or 7 mo ago, and after a reformat they were still happening, and now it seems those occasional freezes have blown up to this.

[Nightingale_zero]

Did you see if the cooling fan is still working? Its possible the fan died and the card is overheats after a while and shuts down from a thermal. Same thing with the CPU fan. Did you happen to buy the computer or build it? If so check your temps on the CPU (if you had a 9800XT with a R360 core you could have checked its temps, but it doesn't so we can't). Other possibility is perhaps not enough power is getting to it I guess. All the times when you said it froze are high stress times (rendering, burning, and coming out of sleep mode since it has to spin everything back up).

[Truggy]

hey US.....my radeon 9800 went out a lil while ago...it sucked a**, take it and get it replaced, same stuff happened. cept it got all distorted then reset.

[Skitz-O-Phrenia]

what drivers do you have? have you tried omega?

[ipon70]

Having delt with my fair share of ATI problems, I would say what you are probably seeing is memory issues. Not ATI card memory but system memory. Goto www.memtest86.com and download their memory tester, its a little floppy boot utility, current version is 3.2. If it comes up with anything at all, your memory is bad, let it run at least an hour before turning it off, or let it go through the whole test. Now with that said, if it does come up with memory errors its doesn't mean the memory is "bad" it just means that its not compatible with that board, or memory bios settings that you currently have.

Hope that helps.

[U.S.Amateurfilmaker]

Well, I too am thinking it's the radeon. This really sucks because that was 1/4 the cost of the whole PC. And I didn't build it myself, it's a custom built HP, I just picked out the componants.

However, I'm finding it a little wierd that the graphics card would cause Windows instability at the software level, but I guess anything possible. I think I may just reformat and see what happens, which also sucks because that's 4-5 hrs of my life wasted right there.

[ipon70]

Dude trust me, run the test I told you and check it out.

[U.S.Amateurfilmaker]

I will run the test when I can, thanks for the link. But I reformatted it and it's running fine **so far**, I will let u guys know if anything further occurs.

[Truggy]

why didnt u just run the test? lol save yourself 4-5 hours lol

[U.S.Amateurfilmaker]

I highly doubt it's the ram. I ran a test on it with an app called PC doctor and it came back clean.

Plus, there's nothing like a freshly formated PC, no clutter or other random junk that accumulates over the course of 6 months.

[ipon70]

Yeah hes probably right....I have only done PC support and trouble shot windows and servers for about 7 years now.

[Truggy]

[U.S.Amateurfilmaker]

Ok, update on my problems. I reformatted (after running the test that Nova linked to, which showed no mem issues), but I'm still having problems. When I edit my second monitor will studder on ocassion, and today it reset itself again for the first time since the reformat. I'm really thinking it is the radeon, which sucks because it cost a few 100. Any recomendations for replacing it? How are PNY Verto's? I'm not interested in NVidias though, because radeons usually outperform them.