B0rked vid card?

[Platinum]

Need some help here, installed a cathode and some more fans (bringing total up to 11) and now im having vid card probs, basicly in this rig after booting up after a few mins the screen goes blank and after a few mins I get a blue screen with the message unknown hard error.
On boot it tells me the ATI driver caused the prob, so I try the older 4.4 drivers which worked fine in the past and I get the same prob.
I thought all the fans and the cathode might be overloading the PSU so I turn off all but the CPU fan and leave the side of the case off to stop over heating and get the same prob.
So nect I put my spare vid card in and all works fine, even with all fans, Spare vid card is a FX5200.
Just tryed the card in the spare rig and that locks up after a few mins of boot.
Strange thing is things seem ok without the drivers?

System specs are as follows :

Abit KV8 MAX 3
A64 3200+
520 watt Aerocool psu
1GB Mushkin PC3500 Mem
ATI 9800 PRO Modded with Arctic cooler
SB Audigy 2
WD Raptor 36gb
Maxtor 160GB SATA drive
2x Optical drives
11 fans

Abit KV7
2500+ @ 3200+
512mb corsair mem
460 watt enhance PSU
3gb hdd

Typical this happens 5 days before lannage

[Steve]

Try it in another rig.

Also try the radeon driver cleaner in case all your installing/reinstalling has nackered them. I think you can get them from www.omegacorner.com on their own, otherwise there's always the omega driver package

[Platinum]

As I said ive tryed in another rig that hasnt had a radeon card in before and that locked up

[walnuts]

Have you tried running your computer in safe mode, so it only loads generic windows drivers. This will tell you if its a driver problem.

[Platinum]

safe mode doesnt appear to crash, not able to stress the card in safe mode though

[walnuts]

Would the ati tool artifacts checker stress the card in safe mode with the windows driver?

[Steve]

Would the ati tool artifacts checker stress the card in safe mode with the windows driver?

Not really, all the rendering would be the work of the CPU, and the DX7 tests will either crash the artifiact tester or spit out an error (I reckon - but somebody will now go and prove me wrong, heh.)

[Platinum]

Got the card working on spare rig by uninstalling drivers and reinstalling dunno wy this didnt work on main rig , gonna try rad cleaner and omegas , know of a simalar software that will remove the nVidia drivers compleatly?

[walnuts]

You're probably right I was just guessing. You could try creating a system restore point and then restore your computer to a previous state using an old restore point but you will end up losing some progams.

EDIT

See you figured out whats wrong. Here's a utility for cleaning ATi drivers

http://www.3dchipset.com/utilities/n...val/dclean.php

[Platinum]

Cleaned out old drivers, installed omegas and still dont work, its now going black and crashing at the point you normaly go to desktop

[Platinum]

Even stranger, tryed fresh win2k install on this box and same prob, gotta be something silly im overlooking here?

[Platinum]

even stranger, installed 3.7 driver and control panel, locked up, removed control panel, locked up, rebooted and system was at 640 x 480 x 256colours at 65hz, all worked ok, changed res to 1280x1024x 32bit colour x 75hrz, everything ok , scared now to install control panel / newer driver for fear of it locking again

[Platinum]

Can anyone explain this weirdness? It looks to be something in the control panel as i now dont have that installed and im ok

[Howard]

Did you maybe knock some sort of connector when you were installing your CCFL and fans, perhaps dislodging the card's power connector, or it's fan's power connector? It would explain the instability

[Platinum]

Reseted the card 3 times and tryed 2 different molexes...

[Howard]

Of course, you've tried it in a different machine. I really should read posts properly