PC keeps shutting down, why is this happening??

Ultima · January 17th, 2007, 09:24 AM

Hey guys,

since a while I have the Sapphire X1950XT and I love the card, works fine, but since last monday, some strange stuff started happening.

Last sunday I had been gaming for like 4 hours, no problems there at all, but when I went to play a game on monday, now suddenly, the system desides, while in the middle of a game, to set the screen to totally black, green light switches to orange and there is no way of getting it back.

Then I have to manually shutoff the pc, wait about a minute and then I can turn it on again to get an image.
If I turn it on right after I turn it off, it will startup, but no beep, no image, nothing.

What can be causing this?? Dust?? Should I try re-arranging the 12V lines on the PSU?? I'm stumped as what to do, I mean, later on it even shut off when I was on the desktop.

Rootstonian · January 17th, 2007, 06:33 PM

Bad card?
Bad fan on GPU? what's the GPU temp?
Overclocking? Don't

Pull card and reseat.
Change PCI-E power cords.

Some threads have even traced this back to a bad power supply vs. something wrong with the card

vick.x6 · January 17th, 2007, 06:44 PM

i got a rma for x1900 and when it came in, i installed it, went out of the room and came back in, pink screen, rebooted and after 10-15min blue,green,lines would come up and it was a bad card so i dont know about yours

mujjuman · January 17th, 2007, 07:26 PM

i'd blame the video card

darkenbinary · January 17th, 2007, 07:33 PM

I had problems similar to this with two older ATI cards. One was an old 9550 and I can't remember the other. The problem was totally random. Sometimes I would play for 15 minutes and sometimes I would play for several hours before it happened. The first card I ended up updating the ATI drivers. The second card didn't have issues after I performed a motherboard upgrade. I would check drivers first, then send it back as RMA. Dust could cause it but only if there is a considerable amount in the fan or your pc case just has crappy ventilation in the first place (if you haven't OC'ed it). 485w should be plenty for this setup unless you have an amazing amount of HDDs and removable media drives. Try the omega drivers, they give you a lot more options for your card anyways. http://www.omegadrivers.net/

DanU · January 17th, 2007, 10:05 PM

Check the temps and voltages via a program like Everest Home. Something may be overheating.

Ultima · January 18th, 2007, 03:55 AM

Well, ATITool reads that in idle mode, my card gets to 38-40 degrees, and my temp sensor which I placed on the heatsink of the card near the core shows 36 degrees, so that's no biggy.

The cpu is running default as is the videocard at the moment, that isn't the problem, more of a driver / software issue I think.
It happens mostly when I play either Titan quest or Far Cry.
Which leads me to question, if I try to uninstall far cry, the uninstall feature of Titan quest pops up, so maybe those two are clashing.

Last night I played Flatout 2 for like 2 hours, no problem at all.

I pressed-aired my case and all heatsinks in it, and also the psu, so no more dust being the problem maybe.
I think I'm just gonna de-install both far cry and titan quest and after that re-install titan quest again, that should solve it.

And I know for sure it's not the card, when I didn't have the accelero x2 on it yet, it got to 70 degrees and all was still fine.
Powersupply I'd think has enough power, 18A on both 12V lines and 32 combined I think.

Will keep you guys posted if the problem still occurs after the uninstalling

Ultima · January 22nd, 2007, 11:21 AM

I might have found the problem, maybe you guys can tell me if this could actually cause this.

I went to install Need for speed Most Wanted and it said I couldn't install cause I didn't have directX 9.0C

I thought well buggers, then how the heel can I be playing al those games?? But hey, I figured, I'll re-install dx9 and be done with it, but no, everytime I tried that, it gave dotnetfx errors and all that.

So, I re-installed dotnetfx and after that, the install of dx9 went just fine.

And guess what, since then the problem has yet to occur again, I haven't had the problem once after that.

So, is it just coinsedence, or was this really the problem??

DanU · January 22nd, 2007, 05:17 PM

This didn't sound like a software problem, but hey if it works, great! Possibly one of your DX9 files got corrupted, so reinstalling it fixed it.

Ultima · January 23rd, 2007, 03:28 AM

Could it be that by getting an error in dx9, the vpu had an error, and vpu recover failed to do it's job, and therefor not getting an image back??