SoftMod = Lockups??

I softmodded my Sapphire 9500np about two weeks ago with great success. No artifacts and a doubling in 3dmark03 scores. However, over the past couple of days I've been experiencing some random hard locks. Each time, after pressing the reset switch to reboot, WinXP gives me the dialog saying that it encountered a serious error and that the error seems to be caused by the display driver for the Radeon 9500.
I followed the stickied Softmod guide above this post, is this hacked driver known to have stability issues?? IS there a better driver that will still give me the softmod but won't have these problems?
thx in advance!

I didn't mod mine that way. I just installed Omega's drivers, and chose the option (when prompted) to install the R95------>R9800 hack.

Maybe uninstall the hack you have, nd try OMEGA's. They're quite stable.

Maybe you have overclocked a bit high as well???

I will try omega's drivers tonight and see if that helps. I haven't overclocked my card at all yet, so I don't think that's the problem.
THanks for the info

Alrighty, I installed the Omega's earlier today and I've already had 2 hard-locks.
This is even more than with the manual softmod.............hmm.....one interesting thing is that the lockups ALWAYS occur while browsing the internet. I played Warcraft 3 for like 4 hours last night and everything went fine. I also watched some movies and it was all kosher, however browsing the net seems to bring this bad boy to its knees. Does anyone else have any ideas?

drop the cpu speed down a little - 55c load is a little high (regardless of what amd says) it it *may* cuase those problems. Windows is not always right about what causes the problems.


other than that, it could be the psu. Although being a fortron 350w, i really doubt that.

james.miller said:

drop the cpu speed down a little - 55c load is a little high (regardless of what amd says) it it *may* cuase those problems. Windows is not always right about what causes the problems.


other than that, it could be the psu. Although being a fortron 350w, i really doubt that.

Click to expand...

Agreed. Try running your CPU @stock and see if the problem goes away. You're drawing ALOT more power w/ that video card, and it does affect the rest of the system.

Good luck

Alrighty, I dropped back down to stock and even loosened my RAM timings quite a bit (I'm now running at 13x133). Hopefully this will work. If not I guess I'll completely wipe out these drivers and install the regular ATi Catalyst's.

As for my load temps, they are honestly an anomaly to me. I have an SK-7 with a 69CFM Panaflo. My idle temps get really low but my load temps seem to always hit the low 50's even at stock voltage. Just browsing the internet and IMing I get between 29 and 31°C This system is only about 2 weeks old and this is the first time I've had it back to 1.6V since the first time I booted up, so I suppose I might see better load temps now that the AS3 has had time to set in and what not.

Well, I'll report back in a day or two and let you guys know how things are going. I sure hope it's not the softmod itself as I really enjoy my 3dMark03 scores and no artifacts