9600xt causing reboot

[dheida]

New Sapphire Radeon 9600XT video card
Asus A7V8X-X motherboard
Athlon Xp 2500+ cpu

When I boot up with the new video card I can get all the way to my desktop and then it just reboots. I can sit there and do nothing and it will happen. It doesn't do it at the login screen only once I've logged into an account. It also does the same thing in safe mode. I can put my old card (nVidia GeForce 2 or something) back in and it works fine. Any ideas?

 

[dheida]

BTW...and this might be the problem...I only have a 300W power supply.

 

[felixc]

Although the 9600XT is not such a power hog, it may be the case, as it seems to reboot when the card goes into graphics mode. Not all power supplies are built equal, my system is very similar to your, with a 250W power supply and I never had this problem. However I did had a problem with the 9600XT and I had the card replaced under warranty.

Before you buy another power supply, if you purchased the card from a local store, I suggest that you ask them to try the card in another system to confirm if it is functional or not.

 

[dheida]

Damn...I can't believe I didn't think of trying it in another computer. I'll give that a whirl. Thanks.

 

[dheida]

I got the new 500W power supply. I put it and the new video card in and it tells me my config/system file needs to be repaired. So, I put in the XP disk and it hangs before it gets to the point where I can choose to install or repair. Guess what happens when I put the old card back in....it works just fine. Well, there must be something wrong with the card BUT NOOOO; I took it to work and it ran in a machine all day just fine. Besides this new card had been getting me all the way to my desktop before restarting. The only thing that can be left is the motherboard............

 

[TrojanSquirrel]

I had roughly the same problem with a sapphire 9600xt card as well. I could get to the desktop on boot and the system would sit at this state for hours, but as soon as the card was put under load the system crashed. It sounds like a similar problem except for the level of stress needed to crash the system.

This all happened after a Motherboard change (not as in your case the card being upgraded). In your case it could be that the newer card has shown up some problems in other areas of your system.

It turned out in my case that my DDR memory timings and cas latency were being picked up wrongly by my motherboard and when the ram was put under stress the whole system would hang or reboot. A problem that didn't manifest itself with my older GF4200ti card installed. I presume that I was not putting the system under such a great load with the older card in and thefore the problem didn't show itself so readily.

I would suggest giving your BIOS settings a closer look.

Rob.

 

[addy]

Are you thoroughly removing all your old vid card drivers and installing new ones when changing between the two?

Could be causing the problem.

I personally use drivercleaner which is a piece od freeware software which will totally remove your old NVidia drivers allowing you to do a fresh install of you ATi drivers.

 

[dheida]

Thanks for the replys. I actually got it figured out and haven't been back to the forums. It ended up being my BIOS. I was reading about my motherboard and found that it has some problem with old versions of the BIOS so I flashed it and it is working just fine now!

 

[felixc]

The motherboard BIOS. We have to add this one to the "have you checked?" list.