[Radeon] MSI ATI Radeon x800xl 256MB PCIe

Question

Has anyone else had issues with this card crashing???  It's been happening to me quite a bit.  I've heard it's possibly the PSU, but I don't think that's the case here.  I'm using the Antec 550 True Control 2 (24pin connector, 19A on each +12V rail) for the MSI K8N Neo4 Plat SLI board.
Thoughts/Ideas?
Thanx in advance!
-Jay

Answer 1

Hi Deathstalker,
I initially was just curious if anyone else was experiencing the same thing, just to get a dialogue going.  Generally speaking, it's very hard to gauge the knowledge of people on a forum, so starting slow is just a route I prefer to go rather than diving in and potentially making things worse from bad advice.  I'm a software engineer myself, and am familiar with building systems and the process of troubleshooting, though this is my first build in quite some time.  Patience is a virtue! :-)
Soo, to answer some of your questions, let me give you a brief rundown on what I've done to date:
Just so we have the same terminology, when I say "crash", I mean ATI performs a soft recovery of the card.  I'm assuming you know what that means, but if not, it's simply ATI resetting the card because it wouldn't respond, and, once recovered, puts my original settings back.  Thus no longer necessitating a hard reset of the PC.
I originally installed the MSI driver for this board.  Upon playing the Splinter Cell: Pandora game that came with the package, it usually randomly crashes 1-3 times per hour while playing this game.  Sometimes I'll get lucky and it won't crash at all.
Next I tried installed the updated Catalyst drivers from ATI.  The PC didn't like this at all.  It crashed while not in use, and would reset the PC multiple times.  At one, resetting is all it did.  When I was finally able to enter windows again, XP was nice enough to tell me it recovered from a serious error.  I sent the status report to Microsoft, and the webpage that the report brought me to told me a thread on the graphics device driver was not responding.
I was happy to see this error, simply cause I was pretty sure this was no longer a heating problem.  After this, I completely wiped the system of the ATI driver, and reinstalled the MSI driver.  Since then, I've had no resets.  I have not played Pandora again to see if the GPU crashes again.  I plan on doing that soon, though my schedule tends to be very hectic.
I also recently installed the v3.4 BIOS for my mobo to get the Venice core support.
As for the IRQs, I'll have to get that later, as I'm at work right now.  However, I'd be surprised to find conflicts there.  The wireless card could be interesting.  I know that Linksys and Microsoft's wireless adaptors tend to fight for control (MS usually wins, big surprise!).  I can certianly disable the device while playing Pandora and see if that improves the situation, if I find I'm still crashing.
I'll keep you updated.  Again, thanx for your response!
-Jay