Crashes and reboots, please help! :)

[Nephilim]

Hi there, I'm kind of speaking on behalf of a lot of people here so any help that I could pass on would be much appreciated!

Juding by Blizzard's forums, many people who play World Of Warcraft are experiencing major problems with ATI cards - total system reboots, locks and/or crashes to the desktop seem to be commonplace. I've heard that similar things also happen with ATI cards when running Doom 3 and Call Of Duty 2, amongst other games. I am running a Radeon 9800 Pro and have tried everything to correct my crashes - sometimes I can play for hours with no problems, other times the game will cause total system reboots every minute of play. I have introduced more cooling into my case, checked my RAM and power supplies, even tried running the game in OpenGL and with hugely reduced detail levels etc etc, all with no change.

A lot of ATI users are in the same boat as me, so I decided to try ATITool in an attempt to rectify my problems - someone suggested that resetting my card's fans to dynamic control might do the job, because apparently all ATi Drivers since Catalyst Control Center was introduced explicitly turn down the video card fan speed due to customer noise complaint. I have also downloaded an alternative interface for tweaking from http://www.omegadrivers.net/ as I was told that disabling VPU Recovery might help (it hasn't).

Was just wondering if anyone can tell me how to change the fan speed for my card using the tool? or if anyone has any other suggestions?

Many thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Nephilim]

Oh and also... does the 9800 Pro not support fan control? Because that menu is missing from my setting page!

 

[trog100]

the 9880 pro dosnt suport fan control and i think the fan simply runs full out all the time.. the drivers will not affect this..

also random crashes and reboots dont tend to be grfx card caused.. if heat is a problem try running with your case side off..

and the obviouse question.. is your system over clocked... ????

trog

 

[markkleb]

I have used ATI cards for quite a while. And I suspect the problems you speak of are more OE (operator error)than card problems.
Depending how long ur playing the case temps may be climbing, and some people even put their computers in cabinets (no airflow). Also there could be a problem with drivers, they need to be upgraded as new problems and games come out.

There is nothing wrong with 9800 video cards but the cards are way better now too.

 

[Nephilim]

Thanks for your responses! In answer to the question about overclocking, nope, I haven't - and, oddly enough, I've tried running the case with the side off a few months back and it did seem to marginally reduce the number of errors.

I know it's most likely operator error, but the thing is a LOT of people - hundreds, if the forum posts are to be believed - are having the same problems with World Of Warcraft, particularly since the most recent patch, and they all seem to have ATI cards... plus I've downloaded the latest drivers from ATI, double-checked my version of DirectX etc etc and have talked to others who have gone even further, formatting their HDs and starting over, to no avail.

I've now installed the replacement for the CCC from omegadrivers.com and used the atitool to slightly 'underclock' the card - and, fingers crossed, no errors in a few hours so far!

 

[Satchmo]

wow has had some issues with ati cards, especially VPU failure in searing gorge. ati and bliz are communicating about the issues from what i hear.