This dog gone motherboard with its VIA chipset doesn't seem to like my
Radeon 9800 Pro. When running BF2 or BF Vietnam, the screen will freeze
shortly after the game starts. Sometimes the sound continues in the
background or I get the dreaded screech of the sound looping. The games
have the latest patches. This is a fresh build of WinXP with all updates.
I'm using the latest VIA drivers. I also removed my SB Live card because
BF2 will lock up if I try to use H/W acceleration...heard this is a known
problem with BF2 and many SB products. Now I also notice this card heats up
very high and very rapidly compared to when it was running in a NForce3 250
based motherboard. I have an Arctic Cooler on it and big copper ram heat
sinks. The heatsinks get damn hot now. I've even tried opening the case
and running a big fan on the card. Despite all these changes, I will still
get lock ups when playing these games.
Now I've been told that VIA has known problems with Radeon 98XX series cards
resulting in lock ups, sound looping, and very high temps when using the
latest Catalyst drivers. Some have tried turning off fast writes, dropping
to AGP 4x, disabling AGP 3.0 support, using older Catalyst drivers etc with
mixed success. The crappy bios on this motherboard gives you few tweaking
options but I was able to use an ATI tweaking utility to change the
SMARTGart to 4x and turn off fast writes. Didn't help.
Any ideas?
BigSky
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