Have To Underclock My 9800 Pro For It To Work Properly In Games?

[SupaTroopa]

My PC has been rebooting during graphic intesive 3D games lately at different intervals after installing XP and my 9800 Pro.

Once it reboots and I try to start the game again, I get graphic glitches such as lines and corruption and pixels popping in and out on screen until the game freezes up on me or the PC hard reboots itself again.

I've since turned off auto reboot in XP to try and get an error log/message to no avail. (just a blank blue screen and I have to hit the reset button myself).

After underclocking my 9800 Pro with RivaTuner (378mhz core clock to 330 or even a lot less and memory clock down to 303) the graphic glitches immediately disappear...which tells me that's the root of the problem.

I can then play the games for a varied period of time before it eventually reboots again at some point.

I don't notice any real heat related problems on my card though, it's hot, but won't burn you at all and I hooked up an extra side case fan last night (connected to mobo - assume a system fan was supposed to be hooked up there!)

My CPU temp is consistently at 46-49 degrees C. (not irregular)

I have a 400W PSU I believe, a newer one, and 2 ATA 20GB HDD's hooked up.

So I unhooked one of my HDD's last night along with the underclock of the vid card and was able to play Far Cry quite well for a period of time before having to retire...

I figured the extra HDD was sucking a lot of power juice from the video card and PSU (since the 9800 requires it's own power supply) so maybe that wil help?

I can't tell if this is power or heat related, so I'm going to buy some better fans (one has dust all over it) and a surge protector and eventually a single 80GB HDD so I don't need two 20GB's anymore.

I've ruled out all driver/software issues, trust me (formats, un-installs, MSConfig services turn-offs, re-installing various ATI drivers etc..,).
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Anyone else have any heat or power related problems with their 9800? Any tips/clues?

This is frustrating beyond belief. The stupid 9800 has already fried my older 19" monitor when I first installed it - so I need to nip this in the bud and take care of things...

Does it sound heat or power related, or both?

I don't even have an internal Cd-ROM drive hooked up for God's sakes, just two HDD's and the fans. My PSU is not even a year old! (nor my mobo - Gigabyte Titan 8SQ800)

I have it running at 4X AGP also in addition to the underclocking.

Games run wonderfully (and look awesome with the 9800 I might add) but just crash and reboot my PC out of nowhere anywhere from 10-15 min's in a a game to 1 or 2 hours depending...seems heat related on one hand, possibly a power problem of some sort on the other....the key is the graphic glitches disappearing after underclocking the card it seems to me...so it's either power or heat, or both.

Specs:

P4 2.4ghz
ATI Radeon Pro 9800 128MB DDR
Creative Soundblaster Live! 5.1 PCI SC
Gigabyte Titan 8SQ800 Mobo
Windows XP Home
512MB DDR 2100 SDRAM @ 266mhz

Any suggestions? Anyone with similar problems in the past?

P.S. - RON worked fine underclocked with no reboots - only games like Far Cry, KOTOR and Painkiller give me reboot problems.

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Is that CPU temperature at "idle" or under load? If it's at idle, add 10-20(+/-) degrees to that for load, depending on the usage. Is it a Hyperthreaded 2.4?

If you think it's the Power supply, you'd probably be in the same boat with a GeForce 5900 if your power supply is < 400 watts. It also requires a molex from the Power Supply.

Check for issues with your motherboard, you shouldn't have to run that system at 4x AGP. Make sure you're running the latest BIOS, you don't make mention if you've updated or not.

Ideally, you should consider upgrading the Power Supply anyway. 450 or better.

[SupaTroopa]

Thanks for the response.

That was an idle temp range by the way.

I have a 420W PSU, so, it should be adequate at least I would think.

In any case, I put in two new case fans (one was caked with dust from construction from when we re-modeled our basement) and tried simply plugging the 9800 into another power supply connector...in addition to the card being underclocked still. I also used a can of dust cleaner on the inside of my case/vents/PCI cards. And left the one 20GB HDD unplugged.

So far, so good with FC and PK, they are running better than they ever have with no crashes yet....crossing fingers....when things go right the 9800 Pro card certainly is impressive.

[SupaTroopa]

..oh, and I also installed the ATI Tray Tool (which I saw on the software reference forum). Enabling AAF/FSAA optimization seems to have really helped in FC and PK.

Time to add things back one at a time I guess...