X1950 Pro Woes - loss of signal to monitor

[Dreaming]

Hey, I'm really in a bit of a pickle. A few months ago due to a poor powersupply I lost some hard drives. I scrapped the power supply, got a new one, but even now I can't set the FSB on the motherboard to 400 without it dying with a blue screen. It pointed to a memory issue, but the memory is fine according to memtest (setting the memory @ 800mhz causes no issues, it's solely the fsb)

Motherboard will be replaced in a few weeks, not sure if PSU damage comes under warranty. Either way, scan will only do a like for like replacement now so may as well just buy an IP35 Pro

But sometimes, when playing games on my sapphire x1950 pro, the screen will lose the signal. In the top right it will say analogue then digital - which is what it does when it's searching for a signal. I've connected the monitor through a dvi cable, I don't think that's to blame.

Sometimes upon restarting this issue persists. But if you turn it off a second time, it works ok. Like it happened last night, I turned the PC off for the night, turned it on this morning and no signal (it posts to the bios though). Then reset it and it worked fine. Though my whole computer seems to enjoy losing all it's saved settings

The annoying thing is, it's hard to replicate. I've tried stress testing the GPU but it passes with flying colours. It's only really in some games very occasionally. I played all the way through stalker without a hitch.

[Tel_Tech]

It may well be a VPU recover problem. I see it at work quite a lot when ATI's VPU recover kicks in after a driver error and doesn't re-initialise the GFX.

Are you able to hear the game carrying on in the background or does the whole thing go quiet?

[kalniel]

Vista? I have a friend with 100% identical symptoms.

[Dreaming]

Yea it is vista. And yea the game carries on in the background. :/

In the ATI forum there is a thread where people have unnervingly similar symptoms all with the same card. Design fault?

[JimNastics]

I have the answer to all your problems, bear with me I'll find the threads...

[kalniel]

I was just going to suggest trying the latest 7.5 drivers, as they apparently detect 2d/3d modes better than previous ones.

[JimNastics]

Have look through this beast of a thread, in particular page 17 (which I've linked to, I'm merkin51 on there). We tackled this problem back in December '06, worked out what the issue was and possible fixes. By the way, Sapphire tech support were absolutely, horribly hopeless, as were their moderators on the forum... pretty much denying the blatent design flaw and blaming everyone's PSU's.

http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/forum...&page=17&pp=10

Basically, the VRM's on the card were overheating under stress (poor cooler design) and crashing the card, sending the monitor into power-saving mode (just through loss of signal). The VRM's are tiny little chips at the end of the board, I've circled them in the photo in that thread. There's a few ways of trying to deal with this:

1) Remove the cooler and make sure the small thermal pads are properly in place (check the photos). Even if they are, try re-seating them just to ensure a good contact... this seems to actually work a lot of the time.

2) Replace the cooler with a decent aftermarket cooler, mount ramsinks on the ram and heatsinks on the VRM's (you'll need to use an adhesive based thermal compound, mix with Arctic Silver or whatever so it can still be removed).

3) Considering both the above invalidate your warranty (in theory...), have a think about getting a different card! Definitely try number 1 at least though, they'll never know you've fiddled about.

I'm still running mine with the stock cooler, everything's fine at the mo (touch wood). Doing number 1 sorted my problem out in the end, having decided against sticking heatsinks on the VRMs.

[Dreaming]

Well I've fitted aftermarket coolers to cards before so I could do that. But I don't o/c it - it was just a cheap card that would run games nicely until I could get a good DX10 card (was thinking around xmas time when the price and the initial bugs would have been worked out).

Frustrating that because of a design flaw I'll have to do more work lol.

May just whinge at scan and see what they say. Thanks

[kalniel]

Ah, friends x1950pro is an asus one, with good vrm cooling anyway. Temps I think are fine.