Sick of atikmdag error - time for nvidia?

My brand new system has dual ATI 3870 graphic cards but running on vista they are prone to the nasty atikmdag video card error that crashes my entire computer. Apparently ATI is "working on it" but their latest drivers (catalyst 8.4) didn't fix it. I'm considering changing to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 cards but before I do I'd like to know if there are others in SL using it and if there are any bugs (SL or otherwise) that I should know about first.

Anyone using the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 card? How's it working?

No one has the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 video card?

I use the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 and it runs ok (could be better but was all I could afford at the time)

Nvidia was for quite a while getting the nvlddmkm error--analogous to the atimdag error...but that was fixed around 3 driver releases ago.

But make sure you aren't accidentally getting a Windows update of an old driver. Best to "hide" the graphics drivers in windows update, before a reinstall of drivers and use driver clean up tools first as well. This issue plagued some people with Nvidia as well.

That's good to hear. I'm still wondering if there is anyone using this specif card though. I specked this machine for SL, or so I thought. My 2 ATI cards are their top card and have a gig of ram between them. I thought I would never have a problem. Don't want to go there again.

So, anyone out there using the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 video card with SL?

The ATI 3870 does have issues with a number of games. If you can get money back do it, or hope ATI gets their driver act together. I have no direct experience with the GeForce 9800 GX2, but I can vouch for the goodness of the 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra with SLI, as long as cooling is very good and the power supply is 1000W.

I do understand that the new nvidia card really only benefits if the game has SLI enabled. The card does sound great though. I'd risk it, but I'd expect driver issues for a while. It even has HDMI ports

My friend has a 9800GX2 in his machine and I got to tincker with it a little. The GX2 is basically two 9600 or 9700 class video cards on one card. The thing is huge, much taller and longer than you'd expect, with a massive 2-slot cooler so airflow and cable room are a concern. It also drinks power, or so he says. yeah... it's fast He doesn't play SL so I can't comment on that, but Unreal Tournament 3 was a blast.

If it were me, I'd ditch Vista and go with XP Pro before I change cards.. much more stable.

There is no future to "ditching Vista."Vista will only get better. The sp1 has already made some nice improvements. My frame rates are excellent. Putting vista on older machines or drivers not yet perfected, is where Vista had major issues. The mac commercials currently airing on TV are nonsense, false Black Marketing of the worst kind. Most reviews seen in tech sites were written by very vocal linux people. (Windows people aren't actively promoting it like it's a religion) Many people that complain about Vista have never even used it, or they tried to use it on a older machine.

The graphics drivers for Vista were hell on earth for a while, and that was ATI and Nvidia being slow to adapt. Same is true with some software apps, where updating to Vista cost them money so they complain.

I haven't used anything in the GeForce 9 series, but I can attest that the 8800GTX kicks ass for SL (and for everything else). I've got two of them in my machine. By the specs, a single 9800 GX2 should be better than a pair of 8800 GTX's or Ultras in terms of processing speed, but is worse in terms of memory. That "1GB" advertised is actually 512MB, times 2. The memory is duplicated to accommodate the two GPU's.

Tom's Hardware has a good article, comparing the 9800 GX2 with the 8800 Ultra and the Radeon HD 3870 X2. Their conclusion is that the GX2 is indeed the fastest graphics card on the planet, but that it has some shortcomings, the biggest of which is the relatively low amount of memory. They recommend the 8800 Ultra as a better performance-per-dollar option. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-9800-gx2-review,1792.html

I will throw out one word of caution, regarding Vista. Vista has issues with SLI. If you're going to keep Vista on that machine, I'd suggest using just one video card. Whether the dual processors in the GX2 will fall victim to the same Vista handicaps that cause the SLI problems, I don't know. It does seem a not unlikely possibility.

For best graphics performance, it's best to use XP. Microsoft is, of course, pulling it from store shelves soon, but they will continue to support XP for several more years, even after they stop selling it. Maybe Vista will get better, and it probably will, but I doubt it will reach the level of performance and stability we now enjoy with XP. Windows 7 is right around the corner. If MS gets that one right, which they had damned well better for their own sake, Vista will likely go the way of ME. It'll just fade away to become one of those better-left-forgotten pages in the annals of Windows history. In the here and now, XP is a much safer bet for anything graphics related than Vista is.

Oh, and Rebecca, yes, those "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" commercials are horrendous. They're so deliberately dishonest, it's disgusting. I can't pretend to be a tremendous Bill Gates fan, but he did say it best when asked by a reporter for his opinion of those commercials, "Apple should be ashamed of themselves".

nvidea tends to have better(compatibility wise) drivers, and more support for the drivers.

Four years from now people will be saying the same thing about sticking with Vista instead of Windows whatever. The same thing happens with all the windows os's and the only one that never worked out was ME---but that was because NT (2000) was so superior and was sold at the same time, people left ME, so it's product life was short.

2000 pro users said exactly the same thing about XP and XP's sp1 was a mess. Keep in mind that with XP it was also hardware and Apps slow to adapt. Everything needed redesigning.

When I was having issues with the new Nvidias, I learned that in the past year and a half or so, hardware manufacturers have gone to new ways of manufacturing and some new materials and these changes are fundamental at the molecular and atomic level. Changes in computing that may cause issues, are not all an OS's problem and the various revisions of hardware that correct problems, are not exactly publicized, since admitting such, opens manufacturers up to lawsuits. They quietly warranty replace the defective parts, with new revisions and /or new drivers---while people are busy blaming their OS for instability. While the new Nivida GPU and drivers were going crazy for almost a year, Nivida released exactly one vague public statement about the problem. Nearly everyone replaced their cards and many multiple times and all that time people generally blamed Vista, Xp and the bigger target Microsoft.

I very much doubt that, Rebecca. I'll explain my reasons throughout this post.


No, the same thing does not happen with all Windows versions. When Windows 95 came out, it was so clearly superior to Windows 3.1, that with the exception of some businesses who needed time to adapt safely, almost everyone jumped on the bandwagon right away. Microsoft did over a billion dollars in sales the very first day of release.

A few years later, when Windows 98 came out, nobody had any hesitation upgrading to that either. Lots of bugs from 95 were gone, performance was faster and more stable, and there were plenty more bells and whistles, to boot. It was a total win/win.

Then when ME was released, it didn't take long at all for everyone to figure out it was total crap. Stability problems at every turn, compatibility issues from Hell, painfully slow performance. It was hands down the worst OS Microsoft ever unveiled, a total disaster. Most people with any sense went straight back to 98.

But when XP came out 2 years later, it was almost like 95 all over again. It was so obviously better than 98, it was an instant must-have. And now, 4 years after that, XP has undergone so many improvements, it's arguably the most stable OS this planet has ever seen. It's certainly the most widely used, and the most universally compatible OS in history.

As for Windows 2000, it was primarily aimed at businesses, just as NT had been before it. Most consumers never touched it. Even though XP is technically an offshoot of NT as well, the upgrade path for most of the world was 95->98->XP, while for businesses, it was typically NT->2000. A lot of businesses who started using 2000 when it was new are still using it to this day, just as consumers are still using XP. When an OS is good, and its successor is questionable at best, it's unwise to switch.


As I said, most 2000 users were businesses. You're right that many of them did not switch to XP. But it wasn't for the same reason that people aren't switching to Vista.

Those of us who were using 98 when XP came out were absolutely thrilled with XP. Yes, we needed to buy a lot of new hardware, but we didn't mind because everything worked so much better.

Hardware and apps were anything but slow to adapt to XP, by the way. I distinctly remember sitting in my office in 2002, after having just installed XP on my two computers. My printer, scanner, and (external) CDRW drive stopped working. I called the various tech support numbers to find out what I was doing wrong for each device. I found out that the printer and the scanner were not XP compatible, but there was an XP driver available for the CD drive. So I downloaded and installed the CD driver, and then I went over to Office Max and bought a new printer and scanner.

That was when XP had been out for maybe all of one month. Drivers were available right away for old devices that could be made compatible, and replacements were available right away for those that couldn't.

Now, was I happy about having to fork over the cash for the new printer and the new scanner? Of course not. But did I really mind? Not in the slightest. Again, XP was such a clear improvement over everything that came before it, it was a no-brainer to do what it took to make it work. It was more than worthwhile to buy whatever newer devices were needed.

But more to the point than whether or not it was worth spending the money was the fact that the option for the new stuff did exist right away. There was none of this back and forth between the device manufacturers and MS about whose fault it is that stuff doesn't work right with the new OS. But with Vista, here we are almost a year and a half later, and we still don't have those options. New devices and old ones alike, especially graphics cards, have all sorts of problems with Vista. That's unprecedented in the history of Windows.

I'll bet any amount of money you'd care to name that virtually no one will be using Vista two years from today if Windows 7 turns out to be good (which I think it will), and if it comes out on time.



That sounds like an MS branded conspiracy theory if I ever heard one. Yes, manufacturing techniques have evolved. But that's not a reason that so many different devices from so many different manufacturers should all be having problems with the same OS. You do have to look at the lowest common denominator. The OS is the shared point of all the individual problems.

It's not like Microsoft is unaware of how hardware is made. If the manufacturing industry changes such that an OS is no longer compatible with the current state of hardware, then the onus is on the OS author to make the necessary changes to keep their product working.

But even that can't be the case, since all this stuff works just fine with XP. If there really were this radical hardware shift that makes hardware and software no longer jive, surely it would have rendered the older OS just as ineffective as the newer one, if not more. But that's just not what's happened. Vista, and Vista alone, is what's having problems.

That said, let's entertain for the moment the possibility that you're right, and that the problem is the shared fault of every hardware manufacturer in the world, and that Vista is just an innocent victim in all this. Should I then dig in my heels, grit my teeth, and decide I've got to stick up for the underdog by using Vista, even though it doesn't work right? Or would it make more sense to use what actually does work, no matter whose fault it is? I think most people would agree that latter is the more sensible option.

Regardless of how you want to explain the reasons, the fact is XP works flawlessly for graphics and Vista doesn't. Maybe Vista's part in that will change and maybe it won't. I can't bet my livelihood on a maybe, though. I have to use what works now, not what might work in the future. If and when that future comes, I'll make the switch, not before. I'd encourage everyone else to do the same.

Chosen, you will see that what I said above is true. The "conspiracy" theory that it's all Microsoft's fault, will continue. As I said, people said exactly the same thing you have said above, during the transtition to XP. XP sp1 was a disaster. The Vista sp1 was good.

Currently all the focus with hardware and drivers and APPS, is all about Vista and XP sales on new systems will be discontinued in June. I agree that it is a pain in the neck....but really it is all about new hardware changes and the drivers and apps, running on Vista. There are many reasons Vista is superior to XP. Microsoft runs ahead and the other companies need to keep up.

We'll have to agree to disagree on our recollection of history, I guess, Rebecca. I'll stand by my bet, though, that no one will hesitate to abandon Vista if Windows 7 turns out to be good. Me, I'm sticking with XP as long as I possibly can. As I said, I have to bank on what works today, not what might work two or three service packs down the road.


EDIT: It's interesting that we're having this discussion today. I just happened to click on my CNET RSS feed, and found this article sitting right at the top: http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9929405-56.html

I don't recall computer makers ever taking such drastic action to help customers avoid any other OS.

I have no doubt vista may get better in the future, but the reason the OP has posted this question in this forum is because they need their stuff to work NOW. One can ditch that great pair of 3870's at a big loss, buy something nVidia, and still be playing vista video driver tag for what could be a year or more. Common sense says that reliable performance for the cost of a copy of WinXP Pro so greatly outweighs the OP's potential losses and frustration of fighting with vista that it's a no-brainer.

The vista hardware changes you refer to are just microsoft prodding the uninformed public to get newer stuff so their "baby" can run on it... nothing more. "Designed to work with Vista" and "vista ready" slogans don't refer to ANY new hardware technology, especially not any solely related to vista. It's sole purpose is to lay out minimum specs and to keep cheap pc makers from using underpowered parts from 10 years ago so their "baby" doesn't look bad. Qie's absolutely right, and that "baby" has some growing pains.

EDIT: Oh looky here:
/327/36/255539/1.html
Steve's on Vista having lots of problems with crashing using the same 9800GX2 the OP was considering buying as a replacement. That right there should be enough proof for the OP.

The sad truth is that either way, with the latest hardware from ATI or Nvidia you are playing driver tag whether you are on XP or Vista. On either, the new ATI or new Nvidia, people with XP are having issues also. The same thing was true of the 8800's when they were having issues. Uninstalling the drivers and using a driver cleanup tool may help. ATI has a clean up tool.


The difference is with Vista you get a black screen timeout and recovery and with XP a regular blue screen or crash.

In all cases it is a waiting game for decent drivers and fixes....just as it was with the 8800's or the previous ATI.

This is what you can expect when you get the latest and greatest, hardware before they have good drivers for them.

One also has to make sure they have the Service Pack 1 update to Vista. Also some of the new Intel motherboards only support ATI Crossfire so far, and do not support Nvidia SLI, which is a consideration if one plans on going dual cards or has them already and is thinking of switching to Nvidia. Its important to know if one's new motherboard and processors, will support Nvida SLI

The Nvidia 8800 GTx's have had good drivers for a few months now and with SL the only issues you get are just SL issues. Other games work excellent. SL has issues.

One can go to the ATI forums and see people upset and saying "I am switching to Nvidia," and on the nvidia forums you can see people upset and saying "I switching to ATI"

You might possibly try posting a query over in the Technical Issues forum. Some of the gurus with the tricked out machines over there never pop over into RA.

There is NO solution until drivers are fixed and SL is fixed. People wil tell you to download all the utilites and get you all hung up in temperature, getting new fans/cooling, power supplies etc, and everything else...but to no avail. if you complain to the card manufacturer they will do an RMA. Sometimes that helps. Usually not. Sometimes it's bad RAM contributing to the problem, but really...it's the drivers and the APPs. Sometimes is just corrupted drivers and a Cleanup utility helps

Are you sure about that? I've had 8800's literally for almost as long as 8800's have existed, and I've never had any issues (under XP). I have a hard time believing I'm just lucky.

I've got a pair of 8800 GTX's in my machine, which I bought almost exactly 4 weeks after they first hit the market. I paid almost US$900 apiece for the things since they were so new (which of course makes me cry a little now, since they're less than half that currently, but that's life with computers). I've never had any issues with them of any kind, driver related or otherwise.

Actually, I'll take that back. For the sake of completeness and accuracy, I should mention I did have one very serious issue about a year ago, when an unbelievably invasive piece of software that came with a Samsung monitor took it upon itself to try to rewrite the firmware in both cards, rendering them each only partially functional. It also killed the firmware in the other monitor I'd had plugged in at the time, an older Samsung. EVGA was kind enough to provide me a link to download a firmware restore program for the video cards, and that part of the problem was solved right away. The old monitor, however, was unrecoverable, damaged beyond repair. Needless to say, when Samsung refused to pay for a replacement, I returned that newer monitor within hours, and resolved never to do business with them again.

With the exception of that incident, which obviously was not nVidia's fault, these cards have been 100% trouble free under XP. I am a little out of date on my drivers, though, so if the issues of which you speak are only present in very recent drivers, then perhaps I dodged a bullet by forgetting to upgrade.

That said, I have heard stories here and there of people having Vista-specific 8800 problems, with regard to SLI. Vista at this point is still only partially compatible with SLI, so anyone using multiple nVidia cards is going to be having problems in one form or another. I've heard no such stories about XP, which makes sense, since XP loves SLI.

If there have been any mass reports of people having trouble with singular 8800 configurations, in either Vista or XP, I certainly haven't heard of it. Do you have any links to articles on the subject? When I Google for "GeForce 8800 driver problems" I don't find much. About the most informative things that are turning up, which are not very informative at all, are listings of game-specific quirks on various gaming forums, which appear to be bugs within the games themselves, not any universally applicable OS related problems with either the 8800 cards or their drivers. If you have any documented information, I'd be really curious to see it.



Now that, I didn't know. It's not entirely surprising, though, given the recent bad blood between Intel and nVidia. If anyone's been following the news, the two have been saying some pretty nasty things about each other lately. It has had me a little worried, frankly.




That I don't doubt.

Yes I am sure. When I was in driver hell for many months I was an avid reader of NZONE forums and it was like reading tea leaves.

People were spinning their wheels adding fans and new cooling and everything else. Turning off dream scene and or UAC or SLI, giving up, then going back to XP only to bluescreen.

Many had XP. Some would leave Vista and go back to XP and instead of TDR's they would just bluescreen. Nvidia did fix it on Xp quicker then on Vista.

My first pair of 8800's was on a XP machine and the driver releases were rotten.

Then I bought a fully loaded Alienware ALX with Vista and it worked fine for nearly 2 months before my issues began. After that I had months of hell, once those errors got going. Overheating, damaging parts, Timing problems, all of it. The whole system went back 3 times to Alienware. I had 3 motherboard replacements, 8 ram chip replacments, 3 processor replacements, 2 GPU revisions. It was irrational and all boiled down to drivers when all was said and done.

At one point I got tired of it and put on XP on the Alienware--no luck The only thing going back to Xp accomplished was no more TDRS, instead just bluescreens, which TDRs were meant to circumvent.

So yes if you had no issues then you were lucky.

This went on from the release of the 8800's when most just had XP, to Vista's release and up till about 4-5 months ago. The threads were incredibly long and contentious. Nivida was banning us from the forums frequently. 90% of it was on the level of reading tea leaves. Same thing was going on on ATI forums. After all the talk it was drivers and defective cards needing new revisions

Every theory people suggested turned out to be fantasy and essentially mental masturbation. It was finally seen to be just the drivers and in some cases with early adopters, new revisions of the card was needed as well and in many cases people were inadvertently writing over their new, freshly installed drivers with a old driver on windows update, till people learned to hide the update.

The latter was happening because the drivers were not identifying themselves properly to Windows Update. So many people would think they had it fixed only to see it return again after an auto update, on the next driver or a update in a particular app.

This went on from the release of the 8800's when most just had XP, to Vista's release and up till about 4-5 months ago. The threads were incredibly long and contentious. 90% of it was on the level of reading tea leaves. Same thing was going on on ATI forums. After all the talk it was drivers and defective cards needing new revisions and this was made worse by people putting vista on older machines, creating the impression for many that the issue was Vista's fault.

Finally Nvidia fixed it and it got better through the last 3-4 driver releases. Of course Vista had more complex issues, because Vista is much more complex and Nividia and ATI were transitioning new hardware and having to adapt to Vista as well at the same time and APPs were also having to adapt to Vista, some slower then others, SL being very far behind. Microsoft issued some hotfixes to subdue the problems, till Nividia fixed the drivers with limited success till the drivers were finally fixed.


The problem happening on Vista was more annoying because the TDR would usually recover, but crash the app and it was extremely sensitive. Vista is like a driver tester--any driver issue would scream at you.


During that time many posters clearly verified they were having the same basic, major issues with XP as well. Its all hardware and each configuration had their own unique issues but all of them came down to the drivers.

Yes. and Intel integrated graphics had the VERY worst issues with Vista and games.

Also what is interesting is Alienware's current crop of ALX systems have just gone over to using the ATI 3870's because the new intel processors, and boards do not support SLI and only support Crossfire. Intel didn't like nvidia doing chipsets.

Honesly IMO all these companies need to shut up and learn to be on the same page with Microsoft and stop with the redundancy of effort, silly competition and other nonsense. It's all the footdragging is why they have been so slow with good drivers. Now Intel, wants to push their integrated graphics and do away with stand alone graphics cards.

I wouldn't mind that at all but so far their integrated graphics have been useless for anything beyond Email and browsing.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, Rebecca. All I can say is I know quite a few people with 8800's, and I've never ever heard a story like that before. They've pretty much all had the same experience I have.

Incidentally, I also know several people with Alienware machines. Literally every single one of them has had major problems. Some were similar to the ones you described with yours. Others dwarfed yours by comparison. I'm curious how, after all those repairs and replacements, you can be sure video card drivers were the culprit. It seems to me, it could have been just about anything.

I'm not saying I necessarily doubt you, so please don't take it the wrong way. Obviously you know the full story of your machine, and I don't. I'm just wondering how you can know for sure.

One other likely possibility does occur to me. You mentioned one of the problems was timing. Was your system overclocked? If so, then it's hardly surprising that there were issues. It can take weeks or months to tweak an overclocked system to the point where it's stable. Even if it seems stable for a little while, which they often do in the beginning, unless the balance is perfect, premature wear and tear on internal mechanisms can be building up until all of a sudden you've got visible problems where none seemed to exist before. I have never seen or heard of a factory-overclocked machine, from any manufacturer, that did not end up with all kinds of trouble (including mine). There's just no way to test for all factors properly in a factory environment.

In any case, if these 88000 failures were really so wide spread, I have to wonder why it didn't make the news. I've got the CNET RSS feed right at the top of my browser, among several other news feeds. CNET in particular seems always to delight in being the first to report any hardware maker's woes whenever they can. But no such stories about 8800's have ever appeared there, nor have they on any other tech news site I frequent. Again, do you have any links to any articles on the subject?

This is probably going to sound off topic at this point but I wanted to report back with an update on my problem.

I'm running dual ATI 3870 video cards in a new quad core machine. Since I've had my new system I've been experiencing crashes with the atikmdag error. Sometimes the whole system crashes, sometimes it recovers, mostly, and I end up having to reboot anyway. There is no warning, when it happens both my monitors would just go black.

I brought it back to the computer shop yesterday. My computer guy ran it through as much as he possibly could with a very similar setup that I run here with 2 monitors. He had it going all day and, would you believe it? The thing didn't crash!

So today I'm experimenting. I just plugged one of my monitors in, the new one. I did not plug in my old one. Guess what, I've been in SL all day and it's smooth as silk - not a single crash.

The old monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 192N LCD, about 4 years old. I had to use an adapter to plug it in at all, the new video cards have wider port plug thingies. Whenever the atikmdag crash happened something funky would happen on the old monitor, the screen would dim and colors would change. Also, oddly, the old monitor would only work when plugged into the same video card as the new monitor. When the computer guy was testing it yesterday he had two new monitors plugged in, both in the same card and in separate cards.

Is it possible that there could be something about this old monitor that could be causing this video card error & crash thing?

I'd say it's possible, yes. I can think of three potential problems:

1. If your video cards are expecting bidirectional communication through the DVI connection (the wider port you mentioned), that might not be happening properly once you put that DVI/VGA adapter into the mix. I don't know for certain that that would cause a crash, but it's not impossible to imagine it could.

2. It could be a voltage issue. Connecting analog devices to digital ports isn't always going to work out so well, electrically. There are several different flavors of DVI and VGA in existence, each with some of the same pins being used for different purposes. There's no guarantee that the adapter you have is safely connecting every pin on one side to the right pin on the other side. If you've got an improper connection somewhere, that could certainly cause a crash.

3. It could be a problem with the driver for that old monitor. Most people don't think about the fact that monitors have drivers, but they do. If you read my earlier post, you may have noticed I had a severe issue with Samsung monitor software, which ended up causing irreversible damage to an older monitor (191T Plus, very similar to your 192N), and destroyed the firmware in both video cards (which luckily was reversible). Mixing old flat panels with new ones, I learned, is not a great idea.


I'd suggest you run your machine without that old monitor for several more days, and see if it crashes again. If it doesn't, then it's safe to assume you've identified your culprit. Also, I'd strongly advise the removal of any Samsung software and drivers that might be installed. That crap is dangerous.

I've been running it steady over 12 hours now. With the two monitors I would have crashed at least twice by now. I'm kind of glad it turned out to be this, I will just buy another monitor like my new one and that's that - no more crashing and my monitors will match