RwR

I've got a ATI Radeon 9600 card and I'm pretty sure it's broken or something (yeah, noob). When I play most 3D games, after some minutes (depends on wich game I play) the screen goes black (the LED turns orange, meaning it has no signal). I can hear some sound for a while and then it seems frozen, when this happens I use to press the sleep button on the keyboard, it goes to sleep, I wake it up ( ) and then I have to use the Task Manager to close the task. This happens in most 3D games, some I can remember it happening:
Age of Empires III
The Sims 2
Spore
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Among (many) others...
But not in all games with 3D stuff, just the heavier ones.

What seems weird is that Trackmania Nations Forever (a good looking game, sometimes you have many, many players on the screen at the same time) doesn't have this problem, as well as Fifa 09 (but with this system I have to set the graphics so they are as crappy as possible).

Someone said it could be dust in the graphics card, I tried cleaning it but it didn't help. How can I fix this?

Thanks and sorry for the (maybe) bad english.

Bolletje

What is the temperature of the card? It can overheat when you run 3D intensive programs.

I can also have problems with overheated voltage regulators... Although that is a common problem with X1950Pro's...

RwR

I've checked the temperatures, I played Spore in Windowed mode with Everest opened at the same time, and the temperatures were normal. But in everest it doesn't say annything about the graphics card, in the sensor part it shows the temeratures for the Motherboard, CPU, Aux and Seagate something (again, noob in this stuff so i'm probably saying something stupid).

GigaWatt

it shows your motherboard (probably the northbridge), CPU and HDD (that is that Seagate something temp that everest is showing) temperatures... i really have no idea what the aux temp is and from which sensor everest reads the temp.

my best bet would be that it's probably temp related... a friend of mine had the same problem with 9600, but in his case, the PC would just freeze. as he concluded later, the GPU fan was all shagged up with dust and the temp went up as high as 95 degrees.

you should check if the GPU fan is running at full speed. if it is, then check if there is any dust in the GPU fan. if there is, then clean the fan, and put it back in place.

__________________
It's not schisophrenia... it's just a voice in my head...

Bolletje

You can also feel the heatsink when you are playing a game. If it's really hot then you know somehtings wrong.

You can also test the card in another system. See if the problems are also active there.

RwR

I could try to open it up and clean it better than I did before, but you wouldn't imagine the trouble I have to go through to do that. I have 2 computers realy near each other so the wires are a complete mess, the tower is under the desk, it's a pain in the a*s to take everything out.
But what really bugs me is that Trackmania doesn't make it crash, I don't understand why... And I suck in Trackmania

Thanks for the tips

GigaWatt

well, as far as i know, Trackmania doesn't require that much resources, especially GPU resources... i've seen notebooks with oborad Intel integrated GPUs that have no trouble loading and playing the game... at the minimum settings ofcourse .

btw, great game, i really love it...

__________________
It's not schisophrenia... it's just a voice in my head...