Radeon HD3650

[Guest kebabstylee]

Someone please help!

 

I recently purchased an AGP Sapphire Radeon HD3650 to squeeze the last little bit of life from my Pentium 4 machine. Installed it all fine, and it seemed to work straight away.

 

I noticed shortly afterwards that some text in some applications, and when on youtube.com was red when I was certain it had previously been blue. This was confirmed when I noticed some text on youtube to be both red AND blue.

 

Next, the games. I fired up Crysis and it was running ok-ish (not as well as i had hoped), and all of a sudden the system crashed and restarted itself. When it got back to XP it said that it had recovered from a serious error caused by a hardware device. I thought maybe this was a one-off, but no, it keeps happening. It has since also happened on lesser demanding games such as HL2 and Far Cry.

 

Obviously my first instinct was to install the new driver. I went to ATi's (slightly rubbish) website and downloaded the new driver. When it came to installing it, it told me that it could not detect any relevant hardware in the system, and refused to install. So it seems I cannot install the new driver.

 

Secondly, I thought maybe it was a power issue, but I don't think it can be. I only have a 350w PSU, but the minimum spec on the Raddy's box is 300w.

 

My system is as follows (unfortunately I don't know the details of the mobo)

 

Advent 3118 Pentium 4 3.06GHz (533MHz FSB)

1gb RAM (I can't remember the speed :S)

512mb Sapphire Radeon HD3650 AGP

350w PSU

 

Someone please help! Every time I play a game my computer restarts itself!

[Guest Dr. Richard Kimble]

Sounds like overheating - you start taxing the CPU, it overheats and restarts , so check the fans and ventilation. Upstairs in well insulated houses get hot in spring.

 

Also check for dust in the graphics card slot, a tiny particle can be enough to throw the system. Could still be the power supply too...

 

Maybe Lazlo can help more.

[Guest Lazlo]

Clean the pins on the card, make sure it's seated in the mobo properly. If it's giving funny colour text it's usually because either the card isn't in properly or a lead isn't secured.

 

Both of Dr Kimbles points stand as well, also if the card is second hand it might be on it's way out as well.

[Guest kebabstylee]

Cheers chaps, when I get time I will open the case up and clean and re-seat everything. Interesting point though (considering that HL2, Far Cry and world of Goo have managed to crash my machine) - I just installed the demo of Empire Total War, and played it for an hour or so on High Detail, High res, with no problems or crashing. Confusing!