ATI 8500 256 ram,keeps resetting

thats what i got for Christmas ,now while im in game it resets itself ,screen goes black ,usually game comes back with out rebooting system,but last nite it didnt i had to use the button on the box and do a re boot..yikes,scarey.when it does come back by itself the blue buttons on botton of window and in im an edit are all distorted,I have dl Omegadrivers made for my card but not anybetter..maybe worse,any tips? ty tiller

Got watt?, i mean what kind of psu are you on, SL stresses failing usually due to powersupply not being good enough.

Remeber to use a drivercleaner, then install the www.omegadrivers.net drivers, left over files from vid cards can do odd things.

The ATI part may be part of it as well. Everytime I here a SL issue having to do with video there always seems to be an ATI card at the source. I have an ATI 8500 radeon something w/ 128 megs and some nights its unbearable to try to play and others i wont crash all night.

Also dont get me wrong.. ATI makes rockin cards(i used to get 50-70 fps in UT2K5)...SL just doesnt agree with them from my experience.

:/ eh well latly, i have 2 pc's with 6800gt cards, they all randomly crash, same with the older one with a 9800pro ati card, just,, bam, out of the blue.Seems a new bug out sneaking around.

You may want to update the catalyst drivers, they were updated a couple weeks back.

ahh but my system stays up running,np there,i have advanced hardware ,psu included and it may seem odd but if i run Doom on my puter i have np..scratches head..what drive cleaner do ya use Thili .i stopped useing em when one screwed up my registry once..ty..

Good morning ,

I just got a new Nnvida 6800 GT last week. I had to putin a new power supply 500 watts due to over heating. I am still crashing. I have my computer open and the temp for the GPU is in between 62 and 65c . Any solution to the problem.

There's no problem there, thats NORMAL for the 6x00GT GPUs. If you wanna cool it down you'll need a better cooling setup. An exaust fan below the GT and if you're willing to get your hands dirty, an all copper heatsink/fan replacement kit to cool that bad boy down some more. That should shave off a few degrees, ultimately a liquid/phasing cooling system would be more ideal to ice it over (along with your CPU and Chipset) but that can get exspensive unless you like fabricating.

Also some ideas to help improve airflow in your case:

1) more fans, if your case can support them install them.

2) replace your ribbon IDE cables (hard drive, cd-rom, and floppy cables) with round cables.

3) tie your power cables together and out of the way with twisty/zip ties.

4) take a can of compressed air and clean out the dust buildup in your case every so often.

All of this will increase airflow in your case and better airflow will allow for better cooling. Hope this helps.

EDIT: Also if your chipset uses just a heatsink with no fan it might be helpful to replace that with a VGA fan, all copper prefered like the Thermaltake Crystal Orb. Yes I know its for a VGA chipset, but the motherboard chipset is roughly the same size and uses the same mounting points. Be sure to use Artic Silver 5 compound for best results when swapping the heatsink and fan (GPU, CPU, or chipset).

What did I get myself into? lol

ah i use this to clean before installing another vid card - www.drivercleaner.net

6x00 cards can easy reach 65-72c if its hot in the room , agp one i have is way higher on temp then my pci-e , you can use a radial fan next to it to blow out air (hope you dont mind noise these things arent quiet), they fit in a normal slot in your pc, and can be put anywhere.

The new casings thats out now support 80-120mm fans right over cpu/vid card and some over where the harddrives are, bigger fans, slower rotation = less noise.

I use a sli motherboard on one, cpu temp 40c/50-65 on vid card on heaviest strains, tho i have 1 120mm fan sucking air out. helps alot, fan rotate only at 800-1200rpm, rarly see it go over that (q-fan)

I have no idea on US/outside my country links but heres some

Radial Fan - Fits in pci slotsthese are anything but quiet
ata ide cable , recommended ones
if you dont already use sata drives wich are way better for airflow


April : do you stop crashing if you open your case , or the same, dont think its your airflow, i had mine way higher then yours (agp one) 78c at its worse when it was really warm here.

Quickly hit a fan next to it tho

I had some annoying crashing at start with mine to, till i switched the powercables around abit, seems to help since less load on it (was paired with 3 other drives ;.;

so thats why i'm crashing every 8 seconds? cuz i have an ATI 9800 pro?

what the hell. is LL aware of this issue?

ty for info Thili, my case is more like a tower/server.altho i only have one hd,one burner and the A drive hooked up right now,case and ps is only a yr old.and it has 3 additional fans besides the ps fan,one of these sucks air out.ill try deleteing all the vid drivers again..do i need the catalyst ,when i got to ati site there is a choice dl the whole package or dl the cat,separately if ya have dial up..gues it would still work,ty again,till.ps al this started when i added ati card,and only does it in game..sighs

If youre "playing" SL with a ATI, definatly recommend using www.omegadrivers.net ati drivers , not the catalyst one (well omega is catalyst just tweaked ), even more true if youre on a laptop.

I have a r9800pro card to, and no it doesnt crash every 8 sec, but my older gforce card beat it when it comes to SL.

What the right tempture for inside the CPU? Right now my tempture is at 63

What processor do you have because it variates between processors.

63C for my AMD Anthlon XP 2600+ would fry it in a few seconds. Mine normally runs at 41 - 43C idle and 46C at full load with stock cooling.

I have pentium 4 2.6

There was an initiative way back that brought ATI engineers into SL in order to address bugs in the ATI OpenGL implementation that no other widely used program seemed to uncover. I have no idea if anything ever came of this but both LL and ATI were aware of the problem. I think the avatar last name was ATItester, so they were not hiding the work.

SL offloads much of the pre-processing that other 3D games do at module compile time onto the GPU. This was sorta necessary because of the dynamic nature of SL and partly because it was expedient to program. A simple example is a cube: this is made of 2 triangles per face (GPUs like triangles) times 6 faces per cube. As you can't see more than three faces of a cube at any one time, SL is sending your GPU all 12 triangles and letting it figure out which are hidden. The advantage is that you can pan around that cube at hardware speed, the disadvantage is it works the card pretty hard - which means heat.

well thats all great and dandy, but i'm still crashing every 8 seconds. they better get on the ball and fix the issue. i've sent 15 million crash logs by now.

Dazzo Street i have a 9800pro card to, and im not crashing every 8 sec ,more to blame on your software/hardware things you have , its easy to blame SL for it, but wouldnt i be crashing every 8 sec to if it was SL's fault cause i use a 9800 card.

well maybe its the sim I hang out in. either way I hope the crash logs help them. And I wasnt "blaming" LL. Chill.

My point was: LL and ATI tried, they've stopped. I wouldn't expect much movement on that front. Thili does have a point, but there are tons of cases where people with machines as identical as can be determined (e.g. like checking AGP bridge chip revisions) have wildly different experiences with SL.

I've never quite understood how SL and its interaction with the client machine can be so utterly fragile.

I have the ATI Sapphire Radeon X850 XT 256 MB graphics card. My screen has went black four times in SL since the last upgrades. It locks my computer and I have to reboot by holding the power button. This only happens in SL and after being in game for a couple of hours or more.

Also the card showed a neighbor's trees coming through my wall but in reality the trees are not coming through the wall when viewed by other cards.

Any body else experiencing any of this with an ATI card? This is one of ATI's newest and top of the line cards, so it is wierd this sort of thing would happen. Any ideas?