Hey all! I am having a big problem. I have searched this topic on many forums and it seems that I am not the only person having this issue. Unfortunately everyones recommendations have not helped. I was checking my settings in Dxdiag and smartgart and noticed that AGP acceleration and fast-write are disabled. If I change the settings to 8x or whatever, it just reverts back to the 1x immediately. I already downloaded my latest mobo drivers and Catalyst beta drivers, with no luck. Iuninstalled them first, then reinstalled. Here are my specs: P4 3.0 Ghz Northwood (not oc'd) Zalman CU/Alu heatsink/fan ATI Radeon 9800 PRO Windows XP Pro w/ SP1 NO SOUNDCARD (buying a Audigy gamer sound card today) 17 in. CRT monitor 1 GB of OCZ performance-series DDR400 RAM (2 x 512MB) I was playing Doom 3 last night and noticed that my computer was crashing frequently. Through Dxdiag I changed the sound acceleration setting to basic, and my pc stopped crashing. Then I bumped up the resolution from 600x480 to 1024 and it would start crashing to desktop within a couple minutes. So, after checking everything I noticed the problem with the smartgart and dxdiag settings at 1x. To my knowledge my mobo does NOT have any AGP settings in the bios aside from changing between AGP/PCI and PCI/AGP. I have downloaded all the latest drivers for both the mobo and for my 9800 Pro. I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled the latest ones. Am I doing something wrong here? Am I not installing them in the correct order? Could not having a soundcard be affecting this? I wouldnt think so, but hey I am a noob I have a suspicion its the drivers causing me my headaches. I donwloaded 3d mark to benchmark the card later. Someone told me that the AGP is probably working fine, its just the smartgart not being able to recognize the AGP settings. Could someone please explain the specific order I should be installing these drivers? Any replies would be appreciated!
oops! I forgot to add the mobo and psu info. The mobo is a Asus P4P800e dlx and the psu is Raidmax 420W. I doubt its the power supply. I am really confused about this
I'm highly suspect of the RAM, being that it's OCZ, because they've had a very shady past. Download Memtest for either a floppy or .iso to burn to CD, and then boot off that. Let it run for at least a few hours, but if you can, let it run for 24 hours just to ensure it's not the problem. I'd also try the Omega Drivers instead of the Catalyst ones, since they sometimes fix the problem over ATi's stock ones. Just get the latest ones Omega has. Lastly, keep an eye on your CPU temp. While the P4 does have built in thermal protection, too much heat can still do a number on it.
Problem has been solved. Thanks for the suggestions Big B. I ran memtest, ram is working fine. I reformatted my hd and reinstalled everything. The only thing I can think I screwed up was when I originally installed my chipset driver. Thx again, and hope this thread can help any one having a similar problem.
