Is it the card or the drivers?

[Asrai]

I wrote the post a few days ago 'All was well now all is gone' about having problems with the computer rebooting itself, BSoD's, ect. I think I have it narrowed down but I need some help. I reinstalled Windows by itself, nothing else. I used the restart option from the desktop numerous times, no BSoD's, no rebooting by itself, even ran a few Windows games. All was fine. Tried to install the video drivers. Now I get the BSoD. It's an ATI Radeon x1900xtx with the newest Catalyst software (I got it directly from ATI). Could it be the card is bad itself or just the drivers? How can I check? I don't have another pc that has a pci-e slot so I am kind of limited.

[boondokk]

I have had similar problems with older ATI cards, but haven't seen it lately. Is this a brand new build? or are you doing a serious upgrade overhaul? This happened to me when i tried to replace my old ATI card with a newer NVidia card. The ATI drivers were not happy that i put in an NVidia card (even after I removed the old device in Device Manager and uninstalled Catalyst) and the gave me a BSOD. To make a short story shorter, I went out and bought another ATI card and the computer booted up just fine.

What does the BSOD say? Any specific error messages beyond the "Your system is now a boat anchor and has had an error" junk? Usually it has a line of code that contains valuable information on what exactly is going on.

[Asrai]

It's a brand new build. The specs are:

Asus A8N premium
AMD Athlon 64 4600+
Corsair Value Select 1024 PC3200
Ultra X-Finity 600w psu
ATI x1900xtx 512
Maxtor 160g SATA
NEC 16x DVD Burner

The problem is is I get a different BSoD error each time, like Page Fault in Non Paged area, pfn_list corrupt, CID_HANDLE_DELETION and a few others. When I got it up and running the first time last Friday it was running fine and all day Saturday it was fine. When I turned it on Sunday it went nuts crashing everything and it hasn't been the same since, even with a full reinstall of Windows. I really need some help.

[flanzig1]

Some of those errors can be memory errors. Download Memtest to test your ram. Also, run Maxtor's hard drive test utility to double check the HD.

[Asrai]

It won't run MaxBlast :mad: . It comes up as "your RAM disk is c:. Thank you using MaxBlast". That's all I get.

[flanzig1]

Maxblast is the formating utility, need to use the Powermax utility.

[Asrai]

Well, I'm not gonna be using anything at the moment because now it won't even turn on. The light on the mobo is on but I hit the switch and nothing.

[newbuilder14]

Your power supply probably has problems - Ultras are kind of junk.

[Asrai]

Could that be the cause of all my other problems as well? I know for a big powerhouse system you need a good ps, so maybe I have been looking at the wrong things?

[Alaron]

It's not the quantity of wattage is the quality of the power. And Ultra units can be poor quality. If you have any other good power supplies, try swapping them.

Poor power can cause all kinds of instability.

[Asrai]

Oh gee thanks, now I have to go spend more money :p . I'll tell hubby the great news when he comes home. I'll let you know how it goes when I put the new one in.

[jfk]

Yep, that Ultra isn't the best and the 1900 cards are power hungry. You want at LEAST 450 watts from a quality supplier such as FSP, Antec, OCZ, Sparkle etc. You also want it to have at least 30 amps on the 12 volt rail....if it has 2 12volt lines (as it should), you add them together to assure you have the 30 amps.

[Alaron]

Here is our list of brands to buy and avoid: http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=131195

[Asrai]

Thanks for the link. Shopping day for me tomorrow:D . And thanks for all the help...this is my first big build and I seems to not be doing so well lol.