BleepingComputer.com: ATI Radeon 4650

My old video card crashed the system on my desktop some months ago. I purchased this video card as a replacement but it has progressively gotten worse. I run win xp pro sp2. MoBo is a Asus P5n32 -SLI . Deluxe P4 3.0 Ghz with 4 gigs of ram that windows only sees 2.75gigs. Thew problems is when I play any video other than youtube my system freezes. I have used the 10.6 drivers & tried the 9.12. Still does the same. XP is a fresh install as I thought I would try that. I have tried various different plyers & it always ends the same , freezes the pc. I am frustrated to the point of replacing the card. This problem goes back to it's install. Any ideas or fixes? Thanks

Hello and welcome to Bleepingcomputer.

I am curious, have you have tried making a few changes to your graphics card settings in your BIOS utility?

There are settings in your BIOS you can change that are related to how your graphics card performs.

I would look into those settings and make a few changes to see if this corrects your problem.

Also make sure your PSU is supplying enough output to the motherboard and graphics card for a stable system.

Need further advice? Just ask.

Tried the bios & that didn't work either. The power supply is more than adequate for the pc as well.

I need to ask you a little bit about what happened with your origional video card.

You said it crashed your system a few months ago, so I am curious what you mean by crashed the system.

Did the video card over heat? Stop working?

What I am trying to figure out here is if your motherboard has a problem with the video slot or not.

Or if your motherboard is failing and needs to be replaced.

The more details you provide, the better a solution can be found.

Actually I posted the question about the video card that crashed on this site as well. It was answered, by listening to the error beeps. The pc would not load. Stop on error, the error was the video card. I simply replaced it with what I usually get radeon.

You could try going into your BIOS setup untility and looking for the following in the main BIOS menu "Stop on no errors" and see if the system boots, if so please post back the results.

I may recommend you looking into flashing your BIOS chip with a newer firmware version, this one may have a bug in it, or the newer one might contain a possible fix for this issue.

Being at this point I do not know what BIOS version you have I can not advise you on that proceedure at this time, or if there is a version available with a possile fix.

We'll look into that possibility next if needed.

Kind regards.

This post has been edited by MrBruce1959: 03 July 2010 - 09:40 PM

I am trying to load the newest bios version but asus update seems to be a little "wierd" tonight. Says there is a newer version , downloads it & then .........nothing. I'll try again & see what happens & try the stop on errors in bios & let you know.

Ok

Make sure you do not brick your motherboard during the BIOS update please!

Do not turn off the computer until told to do so!

One of the staff members of the BC advisor team and a very good friend of mine named The Patriot09 PMed me and suggested to me your problem might be related to your power supply may not have enough output to power everything in your computer.

Hey I give credit where credit is due

So I think that is worth looking into, because if your PSU isn't supplying enough amperage to the video card this can happen, specially if your graphics card is drawing a lot of amps during high accelleration.

Thanks The patroit09 for your help!

You may not have enough amps from your PSU to power everything during peak demands.

Can you give a basic run down of the hard ware you have installed in your computer tower?

The Asus web site has a PSU wattage calulator at this link below, it might help you determine your needs and whether your exceeding them.

http://support.asus.com/PowerSupplyCalcula...SLanguage=en-us

Keep us posted.

This post has been edited by MrBruce1959: 04 July 2010 - 10:12 AM

Yes I have 535 watts on the enermax power supply. As I told the patriot09 I am an electrician & built this pc. I did the Asus calculator & it suggested 500Watts. I just managed to load the latest bios from asus & at least now xp sees my 4 gig of ram. Thanks

power supply calculators arnt always accurate, the amperage is just as important as the wattage, and is often overlooked in calculators. I fried a 600 watt PSU once time because I went off a power supply calculator-it told me I only needed 500 watts, and I had a 600 watt, had results almost identical to what yours was, increasingly worse, until it ended in a cloud of smoke. And that video card isnt power hungry, nor is the CPU, with the hardware youve mentioned Im assuming your right in that the PSU should supply enough power, however, if your running 4 hard drives in raid and a TV tuner card as well, on top of that, it could be. Im not necessarily saying your wrong, it might not be the PSU-it could be the BIOS thing like MrBruce has suggested, I would definetly try that before messing with the PSU.

On another note with the PSU, that PSU may in fact, supply the necessary power, however, when your previous video card died it may have damaged your Power supply resulting in it not supplying as much power as it should, Enermax is not a brand of PSU that I have much experience with, and haven't read the best reviews about them. But this again doesn't necessary mean the PSU is the culprit. I would follow mrbruces advice and get the BIOS updated, If you cant download the latest on your computer, try it on another computer. Also, what process are you using to flash it? are you updating it from inside windows using an ASUS tool, or are you going to try to flash it from diskette/USB thumb drive? in any case, like I stated in my pm to mrbruce (you first by accident) Im rather busy with work right now, Ill try to keep up but may not be able to, mrbruce is more then qualified to further assist here, follow his directions and I have no doubt the problem will be solved in no time, and like I said I shall try and check back and see how its going.

b1mmuo27, on Jul 3 2010, 11:57 PM, said:

Well we are making some progress here, I see you stated above your RAM is now being recognized as 4 Gb, that's good news and one of the reasons I suggest checking for BIOS firmware updates.

If the calculator is correct, that only leaves you with 35 WATTS to play with and in the event a peripheral demands more from the PSU you can run short of surplus resoures pretty quick!

Did the BIOS update seem to fix your video problem?

If not, perhaps you should subtract a piece of hardware to see if the video problem goes away, if it does, you need a PSU with a little bit more ummppfff!!

Thanks for your input The Patriot09, I just see you fineally posted after I sent this reply.

This post has been edited by MrBruce1959: 03 July 2010 - 11:27 PM

I have 4 serial ata drive not running raid. I originally ran raid 0 but had a windows crash & lost most of my data. LG cd/dvd writer, asus cd read/write. 3 1/2" floppy drive. No tuner card. On board audio & network. That's it. I'll pull it out of the desk today & put an amprobe on it. I can set it for peak power. One thing I don't understand is why does youtube video play with no freezing? As I said I don't have a tv tuner card. It plays through the internet.

What type of Internet do you have?

You most likely have either cable modem high speed Internet or DSL.

You should try watching a video from HuLu.com and see if you get a lot of video buffering or freez-frames during one of their videos.

I know some web sites with streaming videos are probmatic when they have a lot of users are logged into the same server at the same time. But the videos are fine when there isn't a host of people logged in at the same time. Its basically some web sites band-width gets used up and thus their video drop out or break up.

This post has been edited by MrBruce1959: 04 July 2010 - 11:03 AM

I have dsl. I suppose we can call this success. But considering a bios update maybe you can tell me if this is the new problem. Blue screen.
WIN32K.sys
page_fault_nonpaged_area
blah blah blah..maybe hardware or software related
TECH INFO
STOP: 0x00000050 ( 0 x A07B18F0, 0 x 00000000, 0 x BF806A3F, 0 x 00000000)
WIN32.sys-addressBF806A base at BF800000, DATE STAMP 4bdd1407

What is this mess now? Thanks

This post has been edited by b1mmuo27: 04 July 2010 - 12:52 PM

Did a little searching, and that error code normally accompanies bad memory. And by memory, im not just talking about system memory, bad graphics card memory, or bad cache in the Processor, can also cause this issue. I would recomend downloading and running memtest86 and running that to eliminate that as a possible problem. If memtest shows errors, then it is system memory, if it doesnt then its either your processor cache or video Ram.