System crashing with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

[Shadow]

Hi All,
I have a nasty bug here in IL2 and its driving me nuts not to mention slowly hurting my machine , which is practically brand new (3 months old). I have a 400 watt tower with an Asus board running the AMD Athlon 2200XP processor with 1/2 gig DDR memory , the WD 80 gig drive with 8 meg cache , and the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card. I have deinstalled previous drivers for the ATI card and installed the newest ones , and I get the same issue. Im running Win XP and have installed all the recommended Windows updates to the machine.

 Issue is , that after a while of flying , or viewing tracks for that matter , the machine will just suddenly reboot! Either that or the video will just plain lockup and I will be forced to do a hard shutdown and then start it again!
This seems to happen during every runtime of IL2 no matter what ! Sometimes it happens after 5 minutes and sometimes it happens after 30 minutes , its not predicatable. What is predicatable though is that it will happen.

Desperately searching for an answer..........


Thanks in advance,

Tyler/ "Ghost"

Tyler "Ghost" Blake

[TX-Cage]

By no means am I the resident expert here, but...How is your cooling system?  Heat may be the problem.  Try taking the sides off your case, and running it.  See if that makes a difference.B~Black 5... end ...

[TX-Zen]

BK, any thoughts on this?TX-ZenBlack 6TX Squadron CO

[Shadow]

Well , to further update this issue , I have not ruled out heat as an issue , however I do have like 4 fans , blowin on the processor , the drive , the video card , and exiting the case , not to mention the fans on the video card itself. I have updated to Direct x 9 as of today , and tweaked with a couple settings in the ATI control , and the issue seems to continue. It may have gotten a hair better , but is still there. I bought a top of the line heatsink for the processor itself , so I dont think its related to the processor , but the video card instead. Im about out of ideas and patience , as I pretty much built this machine strictly to fly IL2 with ..... :-(Hope this might help in outlining the situation...Thanks again,"Ghost"Tyler "Ghost" Blake

[TX-Kingsnake]

Oh my, the dreaded directx9. Like the killer rabbit of monty python, this often under estimated program is known to be the ruin of flight simmers in IL-2. From what i gather x9 is uninstallable and incompatable with some apps. Rather than add insult to injury let me refer you to our resident veteran on this issue. Ladies and gentle men, may I introduce, TX-Black Knight

[TX-BlackKnight]

1. I sent you a PM to see if we can hook up and chat while TS this.2. I hate Directx 9 and so do the majority of people that I have seen install it. It has major issues with half of the software out today.3. I need you to post your processor temps and MB temps please.4. I need you to run the directx diagnostics program..usually you can run it by going to the run command line and typing in dxdiag.  Run it and see if it comes up with any faults/problems.5. I also ned to to go into the harware setup and check to see if you are having IRQ conflicts.  Video cards do not like to share IRQ's with ANYTHING. They also like to have the slot right next to the AGP slot OPEN and not being used.6. Your problems have been duplicated by people with their Video Cards and a Sound Blaster audio card sharing the same IRQ. THAT'S A NO-NO.Trust me..little by little we can get this problem resolved. Don't get frustrated....believe me it don't help."We can fix it...my dad is a TV repairman and he has an awesome set of tools.."   Fast Times At Ridgemont HighBlack2B~

[Shadow]

Hi All,So , its the day after the disasterous attempt to join in on a round of missions with you guys. Sorry for slowin you up. Today I did quite a few more things to the machine , including the deinstall and reinstall and updating of IL2. Deinstalled and Reinstalled the ATI driver. I ran dxdiag as you had suggested to find that there are no conflicts found and no IRQ conflicts either. I ran some of the important tests in there and all showed as clean an smooth. After doing all the things that I did today , I seem to be running the app alot cleaner now and after quite a few rounds offline with it , it hasnt crashed once. I'll cross my fingers on this one. Being a mac network admin and technician , I know quite a few technicians  and technically savvy people , and one of these suggested that the Invidia card might be a better long term bet. Anyone agree with this opinion ? Im not really familiar with the Invidia cards. Bottom line is it appears to be running the game alot better for now , but I dont like the uneasiness of thinking that its so unstable that it wont stay running right for very long maybe...dunno. Any opinions on video cards of choice are highly welcome.Anyway , at the moment it looks like I just have to work thru an issue with Game Voice , and this I think may be a problem with the built-in sound card and the way its handling the mic input. I think Ill probably end up putting a soundblaster card in it , so its not relying on a low end built-in sound device.BTW - Thanks for your time at the meeting Sun. night . During the meeting , I had good radio input for preflight and half of the flights and then I lost voice comms completely. I still had a great time tagging along though. Hope to get these last few things patched up in short order so I can get back up there.Thanks again..Tyler "Ghost 201" Blake

[TX-Cage]

If I am not mistaken, most of us at TX are Nvidia fans.  I have been looking forward to the new Nvidia FX card coming out soon.  I am sure it will be a pretty penny though.However, I might end up going with a Matrox card for surround gaming with 3 monitors.I am waiting for the release of the FX to make my final decision.S~ or B~TX-Cage     Black 5... end ...

[GR142_Sammie]

I think I can help you here. I have an ASUS board (A7V8X) and the same vid card. After some research at guru3d.com and amdmb.com, I found out that some ASUS boards have a voltage issue with the 9700. The fix, go into BIOS and make your AGP voltage 1.7 or 1.8 (try 1.7 first). That should clear up the issue.Best of luck!Sammie

[Shadow]

S~Many thanks go out to Sammy !I went into the bios and adjusted it up just a hair on the power to the AGP port and what do ya know ! Ive been running the game and quitting out of it repeatedly for a couple hours now with no glitches whatsoever !!!I really appreciate it. The rounds are on me  :-)Looks like between that huge fix and the fact that I installed a new sound card and voice comms work properly now, this bird is truly ready for launch.A big thanks to all !"Ghost"Tyler "Ghost 201" Blake

[Shadow]

DOH !!!Sorry about the spelling...Thanks Sammie !!!"Ghost"

[TX-Kingsnake]

WTF over

[GR142_Sammie]

Happy to help Ghost. Good luck and enjoy the new hardware. It's a great card once you get it tweaked to fit your system. I average approx 80fps in single player and 50 in multiplayer. It truly makes the game more enjoyable with the smoother frame rates...Now, where is that beer??

[Innocent]

Hello, I'm having similar trouble with the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and have thus far been unable to fix it.I am not a member of the TX Squadron, but would really appreciate it if someone could help me out.  Problem:  Game freezes, usually just locks up, sometimes turns off the display, but the result is always the same, I'm forced to turn the power off.  This usually occurs either while loading a mission, or within 5 seconds of loading.  A few times it has made it about 15 minutes into a mission.  System:  2.2 GHz Pentium 4Intel D845GEBV2 Motherboard512 MB DDR Memory40 and 34 Gig hard drives, both at least half emptyATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video CardSound Blaster Live! Platinum, with Optical I/O Sound Card.Attempted Fixes thus far:Initially thought that the problem was a simply a driver error, I had trouble with Warcraft 3 until I installed an old ATI driver.  This combined with turning off Fast Write actually worked for a time, I played for well over an hour after changing those settings, but this was not repeatable.  The problem returned the next time I tried to play, without changing the settings.My power supply was too small, only a 250W power supply, and I believed that this was likely my problem.  I have now installed a 430W power supply, but the problem continues.With the larger Power Supply I also purchased a cooling fan, for what it's worth my onboard thermocouples are registering at under 90 degrees Farenheight, so it is probably not a heat issue.Also:  I've had trouble with Never Winter Nights crashing, but it is neither consistent, or as common as Il-2.If anyone has any advice, I am quite desperate now.

[TX-EcoDragon]

Well, unfortunatelly Shadow never actually worked out his Radeon Issues, though he did have some initial succes as stated above though he is now running an nVidia Ti4600. His issues seem to be different from the fairly common OpenGL issues that others have.TX-Ersky did get his 9500 to run well, though he did a full reformat and reinstallation of everything on his machine. Did you happen to use an nVidia card in this machine before adding the ATI?There is no doubt that the ATI cards produce excellent quiality images and performance when running well, it is a shame that they can be so finisky in our chosen sim.S!TX-EcoDragonBlack 1TX Squadron XO