Crap... did I just nuke my 8500?

[MightyJoe7]

Hi all... I got my oem 64mb radeon 8500 from newegg yesterday and put it in my system. After playing around with 3dmark a bit I decided to try out tweak3d... so I put my ram and gpu both up to 290 and ran 3dmark some more. Then I set my agp aperature to 64 megs from 128 to see if it did anything... a little drop in score, so I decided to try out 256, and that's when my problems started. Now windows seems to run much slower, like where I used to click on something and it'd flash open, it lags. I ran 3dmark and was appalled when I got a consistent 4-5 fps on the low detail car chase test... Alrighty I figured, just turn the agp back to 128 and I'll be on my merry way. Unfortunately that didn't change a thing, and I'm still having all of the problems listed above even though my system set just how it was when it ran great. I even set my vid card back to default and disabled tweak3d for the time being. I've tried to run games as well, in hopes that for some reason 3dmark was screwed up... same thing, horrible frame rates. Right now I'm thinking that my vid ram is fried, because whenever it runs 3dmark, the harddrive is constantly churning... I mean the light is constantly lit, like it's having to run the test right from the harddrive, and the constant frame rates seem to make it seem that it's being limited by my harddrive speed. I've counted out the possibility of my system memory, chip, or harddrive because I ran sandra on each and got the same score as usual. I'm just hoping that someone could give me some more ideas, or confirm my theory that I have no video memory... please help! My system specs are as follows

Epox 8k3a
XP-1800 @ 1620ish (9.5x169)
256samsung pc2700
and obviously, radeon 8500 64meg

thanks, I hope I can get this squared away... I'm hoping it's some setting I'm not thinking of

"Mighty" Joe

 

[attack]

hmm well i'd try an OS scrub and reinstall windows. keep your AGP app at 64 and do it....That's my only idea

 

[MightyJoe7]

well I know it's not my operating system, and now I'm pretty sure it's a bum video card because I just installed my old card and my computer's running fine... looks like it's time to rma this bad boy. thanks for the help

 

[JeepZJ]

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the video drivers, I would think that if the memory was fried you wouldn't get any display at boot let alone in windows.

 

[Milkman]

Just upping your memory and Gpu to 290 shouldn't have caused anything except maybe some artifacs or lock up, especially with stock cooling,What drivers are you running, you may want to revert back to windows defaults and reinstall the drivers,that is the easiest thing to try,if the display seems ok than most likely the card is fine, worst case reinstall that os and try again,My Radeon retail will run at 300/600 with a crystal orb and ramsinks installed and they have never been very warm to the touch even after looping 3Dmark.

 

[MightyJoe7]

ok here's an update for you guys. I've tried reinstalling two different driver versions with the card, both with the same results. I also threw in an old tnt2, and it seemed to run 3dmark just fine... so I'm not sure my os is to blame on this one. One very odd thing is that the problem only seems to affect certain demos in the 3dmark test, and only certain games. for example, both the low and high detail car chase test runs under 5 fps, dragothic runs fine, the low detail lobby scene runs fine, but the high detail lobby runs under 10 fps... everything else seems to run fine too, the nature scene, etc. Counter-strike runs like there's no problem, but medal of honor runs horribly. what I don't get is that whenever I get these horrible frame rates, my harddrive is crunching away like mad... it does it all throughout the 3dmark tests that go slow, but is just fine on those that run normally. same for medal of honor... the second I load the game the harddrive is just crunching like mad, even when sitting in the options screne. this one had me majorly baffled... if anyone had any ideas please let me know... god knows I'm all out of ideas

thanks a ton
Mighty Joe

 

[StankPuff]

I had a similar experience. All I did was totally uninstall my tweak program (rage3d), rebooted, then reinstalled rage3d, and everything went back to normal. This may not work as you aren't using the same program, but it's worth a shot.

 

[illbreakit]

I had a conflict with Rage3d tweak too. Would lock up in Urban terror and MOHAA. Uninstalled tweak and went bact to powerstrip, everything is fine

 

[Arkaine23]

8500

My games run fine, except for UT. I just get a black screen when the game loads up. I use Rage3d tweaker, and have treid running the system and card at stock and changing drivers. Maybe the tweaker is casuing my troubles too, I hope.

 

[Grande Juan]

Well since I never have owned a radeon card, I risk looking like an idiot here, does it use direct X, if so upgrade to 8.1, if you haven't already.