Hi, I recently purchased a sapphire radeon x1550 PCIe card and at first I thought all was well on my XP machine. Until I tried to play any games that is ! When trying to play SWAT4 (or even an old copy of Need for Speed Underground) the games will crash or completely lock. Sometimes the game will disappear, return to the desktop, tell me an error occured and the graphics settings have been reset, and then flip back to the game where after another minute of so it will then lock and I have to restart the machine. Has anyone got any ideas as to things I can check to get to the bottom of why this is happening ? My XP machine is running AMD 3800 Dual Core with 1GB ram and the graphics card is 512mb I think. I don't use games all that often, so don;t really want to go out and replace with a beefier card unless I have to so any help would be appreciated. Thanks Andy
PSU is 350w However, I think I may need to go and do the install job properly as it's just occurred to me that through laziness, I have more or less rebuilt my pc (new mb, processor, memory and graphics card) but only did a repair of XP rather than a full format and re-install. Probably should do that before I waste anymore of people's time on here. Obviously if this is not going to make a difference let me know, but in reality, I'm pretty sure I should go do this to make sure I have a clean system to start with !! Doh ! Thanks Andy
Initially the ones supplied with the card, and then I downloaded the latest drivers from the ati website and still had the problem. To answer a previous question, my previous card was an nVidia Hercules, but can't remember the model.
I'm sure the symptoms you mentioned are VPU recover. It will happen notoriously on overheating hardware, incorrect drivers, old drivers and even incompatibility. First question - what's your motherboard model? Is it a VIA chipset? If it is so, I really heard that VIA chipsets don't always go very well with the ATi cards. Or if it isn't the compatibility problem, I suspect it's the other thing - overheating processor, overheating northbridge or else. Sometimes memory could be an issue - so tackle these part by part. Hope that helps.
Hmm.. Could be a fan failure causing the card to overheat... Try running your system with the case cover off. Check if the graphics card's fan is spinning.
You are right, it is the VPU Recovery screen that appears. I can't remember the exact mainboard model (but can check when home), but I know it's an MSI board and I have a feeling that it may well use the VIA chipset. I don't think anything is overheating, but again I will attempt to run it with the box open tonight and I'll check the fan, although I think that is working fine. Thanks for the help so far and I'll post back my results later, after work. Andy
Well I spent a little bit of time on this yesterday and I think the cause was missing chipset drivers. I downloaded the latest ones from MSI and so far the game runs ok. I have only really had it running for about 20minutes, although that is already much longer than before. I also had the case open at the time, so I need to conduct further tests with the case closed now, in case heat is the problem. I do however believe that the lack of chipset drivers were the problem. Thanks for all the help, it's much appreciated.
Well, it's not fixed ! I have rebuilt the pc, installed the latest drivers and it's still happening. I think the only thing left is to get a geforce card and try that. Unless anyone else has any ideas ? Andy
I have the same problem here also using a 3800x2 but with a connect 3d card. Run dxdiag in the run screen and check that you can run the direct x 9 screen. My DDI will not go above 7. I was advised to remove the drivers, remove all firewalls, remove all usb devices and reinstall making sure that I did not use the windows install. Run the disk only, it didnt work for me but it may for you. I also have the latest drivers from viaarena still no joy. Good luck
I was dealing with the same problem and i guess i solved it. go to control panel and click system click hardware, then device manager click on display adapters. you will see two, x1550. right click on the secondary 1 and clik disable it. restart your computer and the problem solved. It worked for me, i hope it works for you too.
