hi all, i recently made the switch from nvidia to ATI with a HIS HD 3650 AGP graphics card. after playing IL2 1946 for a while i switched to playing dawn of war dark crusade. about 5 minutes into playing the screen froze and the whole computer became non-responsive. now it does this on all sorts of games, unless i use the ATI catalyst utility to underclock the core from its default running speed of 725Mhz to 595Mhz. I have had the card at default speed with the catalyst utility, and with the ATI overdrive disabled, it makes no difference. i am running a 300w PSU, which is the recomended minimum, could it be a power consumption problem. i also noticed that GPUz could not pick up a fan speed. i also think it could be driver related but i want other opinions before i decide what to do.

i bet its overheating due to dust, open the case up and check how much dust is in there, if you see some, especially in the vents of the graphics card, then clean it out.

i am running a 300w PSU, which is the recomended minimum, could it be a power consumption problem.

What is the model number of that part and what brand?

I'll place my bet on that .

Speaking on hawkecho125's account (I know him), he only just bought the graphics card so it is not a dust issue. He came from an NVIDIA 6600LE to this (without a reformat in between) so could it be a driver issue?

Edited July 23, 200917 yr by Zenskas

You can try Driver Cleaner or Driver Sweeper to make sure all nVidia driver related stuff is removed. But the symptoms described sound more like a hardware problem. The PSU could be to weak, like puntoMX already ponted out, or the ATi card itself is malfunctioning.

Edited July 23, 200917 yr by beats

Speaking on hawkecho125's account (I know him), he only just bought the graphics card so it is not a dust issue. He came from an NVIDIA 6600LE to this (without a reformat in between) so could it be a driver issue?

ya i just came back to this thread and read it again, i just completely missed that.

so puntomx may be right about the psu.

driver issue may also be a problem.

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

download this and clean all of your video drivers, then install the latest ATI drivers

back again, im still to do as ripken said, but i thought id add this error message incase anyone could tell me more

Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER (Q293078)

The STOP code you got indicates either a driver failure, or a hardware failure.

Switching video card manufacturers in an existing install is something that I try to avoid if at all possible. As you've just experienced, it's very easy to run into stability issues when switching from one to the other. No guarantees that this will solve your problem, but reinstalling your operating system from scratch, and then installing the latest drivers helps eliminate the headaches (and time wasted trying to fix the problem).

In order to determine what's causing the problem, I would try two things (maybe Zenskas can help out here?). First, try replacing your PSU with another one - preferably a quality brand name model with more than the minimum recommended power rating. Secondly, test the video card in a different system (again, one that is already an ATI based system, or one that you can format and install). If the card works fine in both scenarios, then you know the problem lies elsewhere.

If the card is crashing in your system with the new PSU but works in the other computer, then you're running into driver issues. If the card fails in both systems, then the card is dud, and you should get it replaced.

i went looking, looks like the PSU could be the problem after all...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/253195-33-radeon-3650

someone here rekons that if underclocking fixes the problem its usualy a PSU problem,

other than that theres a lot of complaining about the drivers.