What a wonderful day I’ve had. I’ve been having some intermittent problems with my Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro card for a long time now, but it seems to have finally just about expired. For the past six weeks or so, my machine has regularly been rebooting just when it’s about to load the Windows splash screen. Done the usual update drivers thing, with 4.09 through 4.12, which always seemed to solve the problem, but it always came back.
Thought everything was solved just yesterday, then I had a hard crash out of the blue while surfing and listening to WinAmp last night. Now I’m getting hard crashes in addition to the above. Games are pretty much unplayable. Some show that sprinkly snow artifacting you get when overclocking too far. I’ve never overclocked this card, though. I see the sprinkles most notably in QuickTime videos and in that opening shot of Mars in Doom 3. The sprinkling gets really bad and then I get a crash. It also happens sometimes just with the Windows desktop, when moving files, etc.
I tried different drivers, both ATIs and the Omega versions, with no luck. Reinstalled Windows Xp this morning and had no issues at all until I installed the 9800 Pro drivers. Then back came the sprinkles and crashes. I’m running Motherboard Monitor and my CPU and case temps are very low. Fan is running on the video card, so I don’t think it’s overheating either. Oh, and now Smartgart won’t allow me to set the AGP above, well, Off, so I assume the drivers are reading some instability.
Any tips? I’m about to say to hell with ATI and buy a 6800 GT, but I wanted to stop in and see if anyone had any advice. I’ve had all kinds of problems with this card ever since I got it in the fall of 2003. Out of warranty now, of course. Should have RMA’d the fucking thing a year ago.
I had problems with a video card once. My case apparently had a hotspot on the board. Pulling it out and doing a visual inspection showed several heat damaged components. It would work fine for 2d stuff, but 3d stuff would give me a framerate of 1/60 fps.
Thanks for the tip. Pulled the card out a while back, to check the fan, etc. Didn’t see anything. I think it’s just a dud. I’m really kicking myself for not RMAing it, as I’ve had intermittent problems pretty much since day one. Just kept putting them down to driver issues, kept upgrading the drivers, etc.
One thing’s for sure: I will never, ever buy an ATI product again. I got screwed on a Rage card way back when and really thought before getting this 9800 Pro. This is the last straw. Maybe it’s just a dud card, but I’ve never had issues like this with Nvidia, and I went through four Nvidia cards before this ATI monstrosity. So, 6800 GT, here I come.
If you got artifacts and didnt OC the card its definetly a hardwareerror either with the mem or with one of the pixel pipelines, in my opinion. Since guarantee has expired this is now a nice piece of non working card.
You could still sell it on Ebay, even with the remark that it has a flaw, as people there are stupid enough to buy defect products.
A remark to Nvidia products though: hundreds of people RMA´ed their 6600 GT´s recently, because of overheating problems, as well as there had been those Hover vacuum cleaner noiselevel 5900 Ultras. There will always be duds, both by ATI and Nvidia.
Yeah, I know. But two strikes and ATI’s out, for me. Love to buy the company’s product, as I very much want to support a Canadian company, but I’d be an idiot to go back after the grief that this 9800 Pro has caused me.
