heat problem, locking up Planetside

[OneManArmy]

My Radeon 9500 pro seems to be overheating when i play Planetside. what can I do to keep this sonofabitch cool so I don't friggen lock up?

[OmnipotentKiwi]

Well, from the least to most extreme:
1. Air Cooling: How many fans do you have supplying good airflow towards the Radeon? If not, add in a couple of case fans to give some good air flow.
2. Remove the heatsink from the processor, remove whatever compound they have between the processor and heat sink, and put something better on like Artic Silver (be careful with any silver based compound).
3. Heatsinks. Replace the processor fan and heatsink with a better one. Also there are probably chipset heatsinks for the card that you can find.
4. Watercooling. If all else fails, water cool.

[OneManArmy]

how about if i stick a slot fan just below the card in teh adjacent slot?

[OmnipotentKiwi]

Any air movement around the card will help quite a bit if there isn't any at the moment.

[OneManArmy]

well none other than the stock little heatsink fan on it.

[OmnipotentKiwi]

Yeah, having more airflow that blows along the heatsink (perpendicular to the heatsink fan) will probably help quite a bit. As a minor air warning, it rarely happens, but watch out for turbulence air effects. :D

[OneManArmy]

well I jsut jerry-rigged an 80mm fan I found laying round to the adjacent PCI slot. we'll see if it helps :D (and pray that it doesnt fall off and fly into my sound card :lol: :( )

[OmnipotentKiwi]

Originally posted by OneManArmy
well I jsut jerry-rigged an 80mm fan I found laying round to the adjacent PCI slot. we'll see if it helps :D (and pray that it doesnt fall off and fly into my sound card :lol: :( )
:rofl: If it does, that would make a neat video clip. Hehe

[NoSurrender]

i bought one of those PCI bus coolers for my new 9500pro and Ramsinks might help i saw some with artic silver stuff next 2 the video card case at CompUSA

[Hamma]

I keep getting lockup issues as well. I dont know if its my card overheating or not? How did you tell?

[Trebor95]

I used to take the case side off, stick a desk fan pointing at the card and play my games or run lots of loops of 3dMark - if it doesnt lock up but does when you remove the fan replace the case side then its 99% overheating.

[Daleon]

I've been getting more and more lockups as of late also. I am not sure if its the 9700 Pro locking up due to heat as it is PS. As I have 8 80mm fans in my fast, and very good air flow. Could be driver related, hopes and waits for Cat 3.4's next week. I also think sometimes lag causes my video to lock as I feel the lag hit and bam lock.

[OneManArmy]

ok good, I thought it was just me. And i still lock up even though I've got mad air blowing on that card so maybe its not Overheating.

I first thought it was my graphics card because my computer would lock up but teamspeak was still working and I could talk and such, yet i still had to hit the reboot key to get out of the lock up. and when I felt the card right after this happened it was hot as hell.


Although, no other game has ever made it lock up, and now that I see its more than just me having this problem maybe its not overheating...

[Hamma]

At one point last night I locked up every time i got into the game, happned about 4 times in a row

[Daleon]

One thing that helps me a little is instead of leaving the default settings under D3D/OGL under video properties set to application preference I set them manually.

2xAA/2xAF
All the texture and other settings I put down to performance.

This seems to take enough load off the card to help with lock ups. Can't wait for a 9800 Pro/256.

[Hamma]

I cranked my AGP voltage to 1.7 because apparently that is helping some folks. I will post later.

[OneManArmy]

please do, that'd be nice if it was an easy fix like that...

[NoSurrender]

now im worried bout my 9500pro :( damn :( damn :( ok im gonna go do missed homework :((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

[Hamma]

I still locked up a few times last night :\ but not as many. I also turned off hi-res textures.

[NoSurrender]

i crashed ONCE thats great its those damn optimazations

[Darkrave]

it is not an over heating or voltage issue. it is planet side. i had a lan party this weekend, and 4 of us were playing PS. me and my friend have radeon 9500 pro cards, and have been having the lockups. i assumed heat was the culprit at first as well. but then an interesting thing happened. while me and him were in a battle 5 feet from each other shooting, we both froze at exact moment. my other 2 friends nearby us kept playing(geforce). This occured once more the next day and we both froze at exact same time again. It is pure hardware lock is what is so bad. complete reboot everytime is needed. My friend and i are even using different drivers when these lockups happened. He has recent official ati ones, and i have some older omega drivers(custom). anyone had any success figuring this out? someone mentioned disabling fast write, but i had a HUGE loss in performance doing this and it still occationally froze. tried low, high, and other graphic settings. last night after the updated xp patch i froze 5 times within one hour and my buddy said he froze much more often as well. so now i'm concerned, because before i only froze maybe once every 2-3 hours. they need to fix this before final release, because i hear same thing happens on 9700 pro cards as well. freezes really hurt me when trying to lead a squad. being away for 2-3 mins for reboot and reload PS is not good during battles.

-darkrave

[MilitantB0B]

:(
I planned on getting the 9500 pro and flashing the BIOS to get it to run faster. Are you guys still having problems? Have you tried it since release? Right now, PS lags like a madman, but almost never freezes. Hate to trade that for good performance and lotsa freezes. If this is still going on when I have enough money for my new computer, I might go with a Nvidia card instead. :(

[Darkrave]

i'm running fine now. rarely ever freeze. and i think the rare freeze now and then is audio related or something else because it is different now. but they definately fixed it so ati card runs well now. yeah, i have bios hack and can overclock card. ati puts 3 types of memory on 9500 pro. 2 types overclock well, but the Infineon memory barely overclocks, which i got stuck with Infineon. :P U can read the name on the memory chips on the card. but with wicked bios hack, the core of my card runs identical speed as 9700 core with no problems at all.

[OneManArmy]

yea... I don't lock up anymore... (or atleast I havent yet.) so maybe they fixed it......


and yes you can flash a new bios to the card to allow OCing.. but remember what you are doing... fuck it up and you're screwed.....

also the 9500pro runs damn fast enough so you don't have to worry about having to do this. (although its a good idea to do once your card is outdated, thus giving you more time to get a new one, but that wont be for a while)