ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Driver Issues?????

Hey Guys...

Wierd situation - I am currently running a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (128MB, 8x AGP) in my rig:

P4 2.4Ghz 533fsb
Gigabyte GA-8SQ800 Mobo
512MB PC2700 Crucial DDR
Win XP Home Edition

Now, I do lots of gaming, and when I play three specific games, Warcraft III, NBA Live 2003, MVP 2003, the game freezes after a couple of minutes of play. Now, I know there is some word out there that Warcraft suffers from these random freezes/shut downs, but that is it.

When I reboot, I get the Microsoft Error Dialouge that tells me the reason for the shutdown was the Primary Display Driver for the Radeon Pro 9700 was the cause of the problem.

When these freezes first occurred, I thought it could have been related to heat, but I have a heatsink on the card, 6 case fans, and my cpu/ambient temps are well within normal during loads!

I am also running the latest Catalyst 3.5 drivers (just released this week) and the latest version of Direct X 9.0a. To make things even stranger, these lockups occur in these games only! I play GTA III, GTA Vice City, and Enter the Matrix without issue, and these would appear to be more graphic intensive?

Any thoughts?

Since you have up-to-date drivers and good temperatures, my next guess would involve the power supply. You have a high power cpu (60W), motherboard, video card, and even 30W of ram...

What else do you have in your box? (Hard or optical drives, pci cards, etc...)

What size and brand power supply do you have?

Graphic67...

Thanks for the quick response. Here is what else I have:

80GB Maxtor HDD (7200 RPM, ATA133, 2mb cache)
20GB Maxtor HDD (7200 RPM, ATA66, 2mb cache)
250MB Zip Drive (USB)
Floppy
Lite-On 52x24x52 CD-RW
Netgear 10/100 NIC
Onboard (w/mobo) Realtek AC'97 Sound
Cano-scan Scanner (USB)
Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer (USB)
HP Deskjet 960C Printer
Linksys BEFSR41
21" Viewsonic CRT

I am operating an Antec Smartpower 400W PSU. What do you think?

That should be more than enough power...

If your motherboard has any control for 'AGP driving strength', try slight increases of this value.