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Another bad X1950xt?

RJM

By RJM
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RJM

RJM

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It looks like I have lost another Sapphire x1950xt video card. Sunday while playing Oblivion ATI popped up with VPU recovery, your VPU was not responding and has been reset. This then required a hard shut down (power button) and four restarts before Windows would load again with Windows has shut down to protect your machine with a different error code every time that I would reboot the machine.

It finally came back up and worked for several hours more before I got another VPU recovery error and this time I went through the multiple restarts with the different errors and when it finally booted to Windows after the desk top had loaded it stopped withthe IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL error and would no longer boot into Windows. I tried to restore from a previous restore point (I had 6) because it looked to me like this was a driver problem because Windows would boot all the way to the desktop. Windows said that it could not restore from this point and to pick another. (All 6 times).

I then restored from a disk image that I had made two months ago, booted up and

it crashed in the same point and the same way. At this time I booted into safe mode and uninstalled my video drivers and rebooted. Still no good.

Getting frustrated I formatted my C drive and reinstalled Win Xp. This went fine

and I had it up as a basic system that I could go online with.

I then loaded the new September issue of ATI’s drivers and I also installed ATI tool to adjust my fan speeds, rebooted and it failed again just after the desktop loaded.

Getting tired of running scan disk in safe mode I reloaded my disk image from two months ago once more, started off in safe mode uninstalled ATItool and all my ATI drivers, ran driver cleaner, rebooted, and the system came up normally.

Is my card bad or did I miss something?

Yes, it is good to backup!

Edited by RJM
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RJM

RJM

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I was thinking of trying to flash the card but I can't seem to find the video bios download for the X1950XT anywhere. Does anyone know where I might find this? Google diddn't help much. Thanks.

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RJM

RJM

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I've E-mailed Sapphire and ATI support, no results as yet. As to why mess around with fan speeds , from the factory these cards will not hit 100% fan speed untill the GPU reaches 95C, which I consider a little hot. I am not using CCC and I have the fan speed set to go to 100% when the GPU reaches 60C and with this setting the highest reading in the log files was 73C - considerably cooler than 95C. I've tried loading just the ATI drivers and not ATItool

and have the same problem of not being able to boot into windows. I'm getting a temporary card today and if this fixes it I will RMA the X1950XT.

Edited by RJM
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RJARRRPCGP

RJARRRPCGP

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It looks like I have lost another Sapphire x1950xt video card. Sunday while playing Oblivion ATI popped up with VPU recovery, your VPU was not responding and has been reset. This then required a hard shut down (power button) and four restarts before Windows would load again with Windows has shut down to protect your machine with a different error code every time that I would reboot the machine.

It finally came back up and worked for several hours more before I got another VPU recovery error and this time I went through the multiple restarts with the different errors and when it finally booted to Windows after the desk top had loaded it stopped withthe IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL error and would no longer boot into Windows. I tried to restore from a previous restore point (I had 6) because it looked to me like this was a driver problem because Windows would boot all the way to the desktop. Windows said that it could not restore from this point and to pick another. (All 6 times).

I then restored from a disk image that I had made two months ago, booted up and

it crashed in the same point and the same way. At this time I booted into safe mode and uninstalled my video drivers and rebooted. Still no good.

Getting frustrated I formatted my C drive and reinstalled Win Xp. This went fine

and I had it up as a basic system that I could go online with.

I then loaded the new September issue of ATI’s drivers and I also installed ATI tool to adjust my fan speeds, rebooted and it failed again just after the desktop loaded.

Getting tired of running scan disk in safe mode I reloaded my disk image from two months ago once more, started off in safe mode uninstalled ATItool and all my ATI drivers, ran driver cleaner, rebooted, and the system came up normally.

Is my card bad or did I miss something?

Yes, it is good to backup!

"IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL" doesn't sound like a video card problem.

It sounds like a CPU or motherboard overheat.

"IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL" usually is a system unit error.

This looks alot like an overheating CPU and motherboard bus overclock.

I would check the system temps in the BIOS!

I've E-mailed Sapphire and ATI support, no results as yet. As to why mess around with fan speeds , from the factory these cards will not hit 100% fan speed untill the GPU reaches 95C, which I considder a little hot. I am not using CCC and I have the fan speed set to go to 100% when the GPU reaches 60C and with this setting the highest reading in the log files was 73C - considerably cooler than 95C. I've tried loading just the ATI drivers and not ATItool

and have the same problem of not being able to boot into windows. I'm getting a temporary card today and if this fixes it I will RMA thwe X1950XT.

Sapphire needs to be shot, 95C is CRITICAL!

You probably would already be getting errors before that!

Edited by puntoMX
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Thunderbolt 2864

Thunderbolt 2864

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I've had a problem with one of my ATI cards, I had a 9600 Pro and this annoying VPU Recover message kept popping up. It turned out to be the card that was faulty. I took it back to the computer store and they gave me a new one, since then I haven't had this problem, so most likely your card is broken. How long had you had this problem?

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RJARRRPCGP

RJARRRPCGP

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I've had a problem with one of my ATI cards, I had a 9600 Pro and this annoying VPU Recover message kept popping up. It turned out to be the card that was faulty. I took it back to the computer store and they gave me a new one, since then I haven't had this problem, so most likely your card is broken. How long had you had this problem?

Please don't send the video card back until you try 3DMark!

I suggest that you at least try 3D Mark 2001SE, if you can't use 3D Mark 2003 or later.

If 3D Mark passes, the video card probably isn't faulty!

If the video card is faulty, 3D Mark shall fail pronto!

If your video card is faulty, 3D Mark usually fails with video corruption or a hard lock.

Sometimes, a BSOD or 3D Mark terminates with an error message from 3D Mark during a test.

Edited by RJARRRPCGP
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RJM

RJM

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Try 3dMark? I can't even boot up with the drivers loaded. Anyway I borrowed another video card and I had the same problem. Sapphire forum

suggests power supply (there answer for all problems) but it looks like that may be it, I noticed that when I went to change out the graphics card

after I had unplugged the computer I pressed the power button to discharge the power supply but nothing happened this time, and when I booted up the first time with the other graphics card without the drivers being installed I got the same blue screen. I also noticed that starting the day before this happened during boot I would here my power supply fan come on high for a few seconds ( something that it had never done before).

New bigger power supply should arrive on Wednesday. Review of new PS at link.

(Removed April 2005 review link)

Must be an old review the 12v rails don't match Newegg or Xclio

http://www.xclio.com/product/PSU_GreatPower/x14-550w.htm

Edited by RJM
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RJM

RJM

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puntoMX,

No, I'm just buying a new one. I can replace the HV caps on the input of the old supply for $7.00 and have a spare with better capacitors than what were there before for the same price as RMA shipping.

Edited by RJM
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puntoMX

puntoMX

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Ah, okay, that’s clear.

They must have been using really bad capacitors, never saw power supplies die like that for the past 4 to 5 years. Are you sure that the back fan is working well? Most of the time capacitors go 6 feet under when they overhead, you see this also on motherboards.

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RJM

RJM

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Yes, the fan is working, as a matter of fact on the day that it went bad, I noticed that the power supply fan was speeding up for a few seconds while the computer was booting (it had never done this before!).

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