I finally fixed my Vid Card problems! But...

[Jason1]

Okey here's the story. Ive been fighting an ongoing problem for several months now. All of a sudden for seemingly no apparent reason(although something had to have triggered the problems), games would lock up on me. I would just get a complete lock up, sound would stop, and video would just sit there until I rebooted. No VPU recover, no exit to desktop, no blue screen, nothing. The strange thing was it was totally random. Sometimes it would happen in the first 5 or 10 minutes of game playing, other times I could go well over 30 minutes before It would freeze up, but it would eventually freeze up. I tried so many different things, at one point I thought it could be a overheating issue, so I bought some Artic Silver 5, applied, that didnt fix the problem. I messed with my 9500pro options and settings and fastwrites more than you can imagine. Tried every combination you could imagine. I messed with things in DXdiag, I updated all drivers, tried reverting back to older drivers, tried the omega's...NOTHING WORKED. I finally sent a detailed problem report thing to ATI, and they came back with garbage stuff for game fixes and such. I sent them back saying Ive already tried all that crap, and they sent back yet again telling me to try just to test to see what happens if I set the AGP to 4x or off. Ive tried setting it to 4x before and that didnt fix it. So I figured eh...might as well try turning it off entirely. BINGO. No more lock ups. I couldnt believe it. But then I thought about the consequences...how will having AGP off all the time affect game performance? So far it hasnt seemed to affect anything really, but will it, down the road with newer games, like, say HL2? What would you guys do if you were in my situation? Should I send back to ATI demanding a card that dosent lock up when I turn AGP acceleration on, or is it really not big a deal? Because if it wont affect game performance much having it off, I could care less about it really.

[Jonbo298]

Don't leave AGP set to 0 or AGP Acceleration off. You'll see a performance drop in games. But if thats the only way games will work, then either something is odd with video card or the motherboard is having some weird issue with 4x AGP.

[Jason1]

Well I just replied back to ATI telling them about it so we will see what they have to say.