Video shutting down

[Guybo42]

Ok, at my wit's end here.
I have an Ati Radeon 9700 AIW installed on a Soyo KT600 pro v.1 motherboard, 1 gig of pc2100 ram, soundblaster live value sound card, an 80 gig drive for storage, a 40 gig maxtor as the main drive ( both 7200 rpm ), a plextor cd r/w, an HP DVD writer 530r and a 350 watt ps.
Problem : Almost every time I try to play anything graphic intensive ie: Far Cry, Doom3 or even Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005, my video shuts down. Sometime I can still hear sound but generally the display goes black but the system is still going, fans etc ... The only two things I've done differently was to install SP2 on xp pro and upgrade the vid card drivers to version 4.11 from the ATI site.

It all worked fine before this, so I uninstalled drivers, tried an older version ( three different ones ), no success. Checked via drivers, installed latest, no success. Flashed bios to latest, no success. Formatted drive, started from scratch, no success. Is it possible that it has something to do with DirectX 9 ?

Help !!!!

 

[Hipster Doofus]

When you formatted what driver did you load? I think the 4.11's are causing a few issues. ATI have updated 4.11.........I think.

 

[Guybo42]

I started with the drivers from the installation cd (xp pro) and progressed to the 4.11 drivers still with the same results. I have just installed the 4.12 beta driver with still the same results. By the way, the vid card settings are as follow: 8x agp enabled, fast writes enabled and everything else is at the default settings, I have tried a combination of things ie: enabling/disabling fast writes, enabling/disabling shadowing in bios etc .... I'm not sure where to go from here, I don't have access to a similar card to try on my system and really like this card and would hate to get rid of it .....

 

[Hipster Doofus]

You could try reseating all the cards, memory, etc inside the case. Something might be a bit off. Also try setting the card to default till you hit the problem.

I know you said 'format'. You didn't load over the top?

 

[Guybo42]

Nope, did a clean install, may do it again though. I have an image of the drive that I did about a week before this started. There has to be a way to pinpoint what caused it.
I did the reseating and checking of all hardware in the case as a first step but will do it again anyway, who knows ? Fact is stranger than fiction when dealing with these things.

 

[Hipster Doofus]

Well it is Windows.

Good huntin'.

 

[Guybo42]

Thank you for the replies, any help is always appreciated

 

[toretto]

i suppose you have your vpu recover set to on?
another thing, in your games, do you wait for vertical sync?
what are your game settings at, it leads me to believe it is a problem with a setting in a game. not your hardware.

 

[Leaderz0rz]

disable fastwrites. check if its overheating