Most stable Video card for amd dually chipset???

Hi All,
It's been a while scince I posted. My last post was concerning my Dual build-up. Finally got around to it after many months and lots of personal challenges. What i have is..GA-7DPDXDW+ MB..with 2 [35] watt barton mobiles (2400's)..1 Gig Kingston pc-2700...Western digital 36 gig raptor and WD 80 Gig 8meg 7200 rpm IDE drive. I have the onboard sound disabled and have installed a CMI pci sound card. I also have a 4 port USB 2.0, 2 port Ieee 1394 combo pci card installed. My Vid card is an ATI AIW 8500. (THE 8500 w/128 meg infineon memory chips). I finally got the build done new years weekend. got case mods done and everything installed. It's running 2485 ghz X 2. I have not run any killer stability tests on it Because.....Here is my problem...everything seems okee dokee but i get random blank screens in the middle of doing something. I have to hit escape numerous times and click the mouse repeatedly and i get my monitor back, nothing lost , still same open stuff open , except, I'm now at 640x480 resolution. It has got to be my vid card. I've tried overclocking it, underclocking it ,super cooling it...nothing seems to work. So i need suggestions for a new video card for under 100 bucks that will play nice with my high FSB. By the way..I'm at 17 multi x 146 FSB @ 1.75 vcore by way of wire in socket mods. Temps are 38cpu 0, 43 cpu 1 @ idle and 48 and 51 at load. Any and all help will be appreciated. And a big thank you to all the posters for their wealth of info on this site. This place was my manual during the build-up and case mods.
coyote

I cursed my AIW8500 in my Dual Athlon, I never did get it to work.
My 9700 was generally OK, just reset to 640x480 on reboot.

I've got a couple GA-7DPXDW-Ps with Aopen FX5200 cards.
I let people game with them and never any problems

I am running the MSI board with a pair of 2100 XP's modded to MP with an FX5200. Minus the initial problem of having IRQ issues in the beginning, its running flawlessly. 150fsb btw. Cant say much for anything else higher end than this. Although these cards typically run around $50 give or take a few bucks. Decent go for nVidia and under your price target. Cant say for any ATI.

run some tests like prime 95 and make sure its not your overclocking, some procs just can't take it like others can.

coldfuzzion said:

run some tests like prime 95 and make sure its not your overclocking, some procs just can't take it like others can.

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it can't be overclocking since he said everything on the screen is as it was when the screen temporarily went blank...and it didn't lock up...

sounds like a driver or IRQ problem to me...

i used an 8500 (not AIW) and a 9700pro with an asus a7m266-d (dual amdxp board) without any problems...

dustybyrd said:

it can't be overclocking since he said everything on the screen is as it was when the screen temporarily went blank...and it didn't lock up...

sounds like a driver or IRQ problem to me...

i used an 8500 (not AIW) and a 9700pro with an asus a7m266-d (dual amdxp board) without any problems...

Click to expand...

Well, I thought the same exact thing. I thought it was drivers...Have tried 5 different ones fron ati and also some OC apps from rage 3D and the current one ATItool from atiunderground. Had the vid card clocked up to 350 core 650 mem(DDR), had it clocked down to 260 core 420 mem. Same problem at any setting with any driver version. I next thought it was a sharing conflict...Uninstalled everything but the neccessaries, reloaded win xp pro and same problem. It's got to be the video card itself, not wanting to play with this amd chipset. It really bites a big one because i really like this card for it's top notch capture ability and video out capabilities. I don't believe it's my over clock...that all seems extremely stable and good...I can even boot at the 150 FSB setting but these blank-outs become unbearable. My temps stay pretty constant at any FSB setting. I have @ HT-101's on the processors with arctic silver 5(72 hour burn in). I have 2 2000 rpm aerocool 80mm intake fans at the front One 120mm 60cfm side intake aerocool at 2000 rpm one 120mm vantech stealth 50cfm exaust fan at rear and a 650 watt power supply with 2 fans..1 1.0 amp fan i robbed out of an old compac...very quiet...and one unknown 1.4 amp flat(looks like a hdd cooler) fan inside the power supply. Case temp stays at a constant 32 celcius and processors never exceed 52 celcius. Right now I have WMP going,(playing some counting crows), am typing this post, and burning a cd. I think it's gotta be vid card. What system memory timmings would ya'll recommend for these settings...I have it set at 16-16-6-2-2-2-3.
Thanks for the feedback
coyote

As stated in my post earlier I had a few issues when I first got my FX5200 and they turned out to be an IRQ issue. You might want to check into that.
Go to start/run type in msinfo32.exe and hit enter.
Then go to System Summary/Hardware Resources/IRQs. See if your video is sharing with anything. If so odds are that is the problem.
Quick question to go with this, what other PCI cards are you running? In what slots? In my situation I had the 2nd from bottom 32bit PCI slot with a RAID controller. Swapped it to another (bottom) PCI slot and bam. Booted up and has ran fine since.

you know another thing that it might be is the monitor's connection to the video card...i have an older dell flat panel 17" that sometimes goes blank and comes back...i found out by playing with the vga connection to the video card that it's not such a great cable/connection anymore...

if i play with it just right then i don't have a problem with it...but if i kick the case accidently...well...

i would say GF4ti series. I have ti4400 at 305/700 And it rock stable from day one. never have issuses with it. I even mod it to Quadro4 just for the heck of it.

Well MPX chipset are old so if you ahve some high end card in there its kinda wasted. Also AGP is only 4x.

yeah, but there is practically no difference for gaming between agp 4x and 8x unless you are running a card with at least the mem bandwidth of a 6800. A friend of mine is running a dual athlon setup on a 9800 Pro 256 MB. It has been rock solid, except he can't get the card to oc at all.

MameXP said:

i would say GF4ti series. I have ti4400 at 305/700 And it rock stable from day one. never have issuses with it. I even mod it to Quadro4 just for the heck of it.

Well MPX chipset are old so if you ahve some high end card in there its kinda wasted. Also AGP is only 4x.

Click to expand...

Seconded. Ti4200 64MB (stock speeds) in a K7D here with a couple modded XPs and never a video issue yet.

I can say honestly I have rarely see a dual AMD not run any specific video card.

I have used the 9700 Pro AIW..And now the 9800 Pro..It is possible ya have a video card issue but most likely you have a configuration issue..Drivers,IRQ, ect...

I would run the system with no PCI cards,,,And see how it works..

(PS) According to Gigabyte the 8500 card passes there compatability tests.

ti4200 or fx5200 it is

Thanks for all the advice. I pulled my sound card from the bottom slot and moved it up one, set the mem timmings to auto and jiggled and tightened the cable and adapter(8500 AIW has DVI). IRQ sharing now shows via usb hub IRQ 17 sharing with vid card(my add in usb 2.0 pci card). Not sure which one did it but havnt had a blank-out scince .I think I'll leave well enough alone for rite now and not try and individually diagnose to see which one did it. I'll run the AIW till I run across a ti4200 or a fx5200. Saw a "enhanced" 5200 at walmart. says it runs 10% faster than the normal fx5200 and has 256 megs of 256 bit memory. Hype or no? Sounds Like it to me, especially fo this chipset.
again thanks,
coyote

I have a ATI PCI TV tuner card and i could never get it to work with my ASUS dual. I think I read some where that the tv tuner drivers and smp don't get along. After about a year of trying it on and off i built a littler PC for my video capture needs. it sucks!

Never heard of the tv capture issue thing before. Ive ran at least 2 different tv cards in my duallies without any sort of major issues.

Glad to hear you have your problem fixed!

hmm, I could not get my ati card to work worth a darn. Where yours ati? Just curious...

>HyperlogiK< said:

yeah, but there is practically no difference for gaming between agp 4x and 8x unless you are running a card with at least the mem bandwidth of a 6800. A friend of mine is running a dual athlon setup on a 9800 Pro 256 MB. It has been rock solid, except he can't get the card to oc at all.

Click to expand...

sounds like myn iv eventuly got my card to 396.00 core and 367.2 mem but cant get higer on ether without artifacts after prelonged play, so it must be a cooling ishue

or possibly voltage

The ATI tuners didn't work for a while on SMP rigs due to driver issues(not sure if they fixed it yet). My hauppauge WintTV card caps ok in my k7d rig, though it does stress the weak 32-bit PCI bus depending on what cards you use. I had a ATA RAID controller as well as the tv card on the same PCI bus and if I captured w/o compression I would get bad artifacting as the PCI bus was saturated. Getting a promise ATA controller that was 66Mhz compataible and went into a PCI-X slot helped a bunch. Alternately, try encoding to a lossless codec like huffyuv so you are transfering less data at a time to your disk drives.

Just for an FYI aka1nas, those are not PCI-X slots. They are PCI slots, but 64bit/66Mhz, in comparison to the regular PCI slots that are 32bit/33Mhz.
I do believe I am correct, if I am not please correct me.