Bought bfg 7800GS OC - constant flicker in PowerDVD (q4 also pauses every 60secs!)

I bought a bfg 7800GC OC yesterday (up from a x850pro) and noticed flicker
whenever I play a DVD with PowerDVD. I had reinstalled XP completely and
even ran ati's driver removal tool before I did so. I also notice that in
Quake 4, and a few other games (FEAR, RCTycoon3), it will play great for a
minute or so than pause abruptly for 10 secs or more. Quake 4 even blue
screened
on me once! I have the latest drivers for the 7800..so Im baffled as to what
could
be causing this. Ive got plenty of ram..400 ps is good, etc. Is it the
cooling?

I assumed I met all min specs:

Athlon 2600
768 ram
Dynex 400 watt power
3 maxtor 250 gig hard drives
1 LG DVD-RW drive
nvidia nForce2 K7N2 Delta mb
audigy 2 value
Ethernet card
floppy

 

Forgot to mention..the powerdvd flicker only happens if
I have the "use hardware acceleration" checked in
settings. If its not checked, then dvds are fine..
they just dont look as good of course. Never had
this problem with my ati x850pro (but I wanted
something faster)

 

Huh? Software rendering is almost always preferable for image
quality. If your CPU is fast enough to handle DVD playback,
leave hardware acceleration turned off.

You might have some residual traces of your ATI driver still in
your system, which might be causing your problem.

 

Well, I stumbled upon a big thread about the flicker/slow down issues I was
encountering.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t12355-150.html

Wow.. I had NO idea that so many people were having artifacts,
"slow mode/fast mode" and pause issues in their games. I mean, I had
heard that ATI supposedly had less stable drivers than nVidia, but
there were only slight annoyances with my x850 pro. My games like FEAR,
Q4, and NFS:MW ran flawlessly..just not at insane settings, which was
the reason for buying the BFG 7800GS OC. I was playing FEAR tonight (1024,
soft shadows off, 4x aa) and noticed quite severe corruptions in some of
the objects in the first mission where you have to unlock the gate for your
team.
The garbage can, as well as walls, misc objects sometimes looked like the
death
star a sec before it exploded. VERY strange.
Some of the comments on the thread are very detailed about this problem
with this particular card (bug?), and I didnt see any mention or fix at the
BFG site:

"The screen flickering and new hardware noise are due to a long standing
driver bug with certain monitor/hardware setups. There is no way to fix it as
far as I know, I used to get it on my Geforce 4400 Ti before I got a new TFT.
It doesn't cause any problems but it is a bit annoying, I used to get a black
screen every time I right clicked on the desktop.

If you can't find the X29.exe then I was using rthdribl v.1.2 to do exactly
the same thing, running it in a window and watching the temp go up until it
was in fast mode. It whacks the temp up pretty fast. Link is here:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/
Even with the fan at 25% my card idles at 36C but it jumps up that 2 degrees
needed to be in fast mode as soon as I run a game. I never thought I'd be
trying to heat up my graphics card, it goes against everything I've ever
known.

And another:
Like you, my card seems to have good and bad days (or, good and bad boot-ups).
Sometimes it will run flawlessly, running games FEAR, Doom III, Call of Duty
2, etc. with very high out settings, great resolutions and absolutely smooth
framerates. And yet, on the same day, I could reboot, and find the same games
playing at their lowest settings and with chunky framerates. While I've never
run any of the 3DMark tests - and thus cannot really be specific about FPS and
all that - I can say that observation alone tells me there are HUGE swings in
the card's performance. There's just no question - it's as if sometimes the
card kicks it into high gear, and sometimes it just takes the day off.

I've done just about everything I can think of to fix this. I've
reformatted/reloaded Windows. I've gone throughout the BIOS countless times,
singling out variables that seem like potential fixes. So, things like:
changing AGP aperture, switching on/off Plug and Play OS, fast write... etc,
etc. I've updated my BIOS, installed all the latest drivers for my VIA
chipset, tried the stock as well as newer forceware drivers for the card
(making sure to boot in safe mode and run driver cleaner when uninstalling)...
nothing seems to help. As soon as I think I've found something -- as soon as
it looks like the card might be working -- I find a few reboots later that the
effect hasn't held, and the card is dog slow again, regardless of the settings
changes.

Also, this is actually the second 7800 GS I've tried. The first - which I
RMA'd - was an XFX 7800 GS. It did the exact same thing (well, as far as I
know: I actually never even got that one to have a "good day." I returned it
pretty quickly when I saw the lousy performance, assuming it was just a faulty
card. So, I can only assume that, with further tinkering, it probably would
have acted similar to the BFG - i.e., good days and bad days.)

I actually emailed a bit with a support guy from BFG tech about this problem.
First thing he had me check was the IRQ assignment for my card. He said that
the card should be on its own IRQ address, and should be anywhere between IRQ
5 and 15. Well, it turns out that my card is on IRQ 16. Have no idea why...
that's just where it get's assigned when I install it. He said this was
probably my problem, and that I'd need to figure out a way to change the
card's IRQ. He said I could either try to do it from the BIOS (which I've not
had any luck with - anyone have ideas?), or, I could try forcing a HAL install
of Windows (which I haven't tried because that's pretty foreign to me & sounds
risky). Could I ask, movieman (or anyone), what IRQ your 7800 is on? I'm not
really convinced that this IRQ thing is the problem. But maybe I'm wrong?
Anybody have any ideas on the IRQ issue?

 

400 watts PSU maybe not good enough try 480 antec or thermaltake or any
other approved psu's

As you said previously happens after playing game or a movie so it could be
a heat issue heat is directly related to PSU issues so check both..

Common you got 3x250g hdd's its using lot of power already and BFG notorious
to suck all the power...

Cheers

 

My XFX 7800GS is located on IRQ 19 (on its own) and I have no problems at
all; the card is great. Mind you, I have no low temperature problems either,
I boot up at 45/46°.

Mike Bernstein

 

I see several problems right away. First the LGs are garbage.
They are noisy, and they are incompatible with certain mobo
chipsets. Next, the nForce2 chipset has known incompatibilities
with with all the nVidia cards beyond the 6800s. That pausing
it one of them. Same for the nForce3 chipset. You need the
nForce4 chipset for the 7800 cards. Third, the GS series was
a downgrade, and is crippled. Forth, both XFX and BFG will
restock bad cards, and push them right back out the door as
new cards without testing them at all. I suspect you have a
restocker. Fifth, your sound card has known conflicts in many
of the newer games .. like Far Cry. I suspect that is your IRQ
problem .. however, XP will not let you set specific IRQs. That
is just asking for trouble. One of the fixes there was to move
the offending card to a higher PCI slot. Sixth, 400 watts is
not enough power for the 7800 .. esp since you are junked out
with all those hard drives pulling your 12v rail down. I could go
on about not enough ram .. blah, blah, blah, but the problem is
the whole thing. Scrap it and start over:
Antec SLK1650B case with Truepower 480
2 gigs ram
GA-K8NF-9 bundle with AMD 64 3700
toss the GS, and get 7900 GTO pci-e
one SATA
Sony DVD-RW because it is quiet and compatible
Viewsonic LCD monitor .. I have X924 4msec

johns