New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

4750: Vid problems with 3d apps

post #1 of 17
12/3/04 at 5:29am
Thread Starter 
Hi guys, long time reader...first time poster, =P

Anyhow...I ended up getting a 4750 back in october, and it's been great except for one thing: 3d apps (mainly games). I was kinda urked that I ended up gettin the laptop...and after putting WC3 on it, about 30 minutes later the screen would freeze up. That sucked. I kept on trying to play that, and a few other games (Doom3, Dungeon Siege, NWN) and it would still freeze after 30-60 minutes of playing. I'm pretty sure that it isn't a heat issue due to the fact that the area I play in is freezin cold and to the fact that once, one of the games froze right after booting up.

Now...sure I was urked a little...but I just said, oh well. I'll just reinstall everything. I did do that...followed the instructions in the manual with the EXACT order of drivers that they layed out in there. After that...still freezes.

Ok...so I ended up going online, grabbing the new vid driver and noticed that it said it required bios 1.03. Reinstalled everything, using the new sager's vid driver....still freezes.

Sigh...alright, I guess I have to get the new bios with it. Reinstalled everything again....freezes. Man...

Then I decided to try the Omegas instead. Now...I was actually impressed with the Omegas for a while. It didn't crash/freeze for awhile and I thought that I was home free. But sure enough, the next morning, it froze. But interesting note...with the Omegas, whenever it froze, after 20 seconds, it would go black, then the screen will be all white. I'm guessing that's the VPU recover in action (failure). So now what? I don't know....

I tried messing with other stuff....like how much HD space its using for paging and so forth. I didn't see it crash when I had that on 0, but games weren't playable at that setting.

I'm just asking for help if possible. Any help would be appreciated. My system specs:

Athlon 64 3400+
1024g RAM
60gb 7200rpm HDD
Mobile Radeon 9700 128mb
tv tuner
4in1 card reader
basic cd/dvd reader w/ cd burner
Windows XP SP2 <-- I hope that's not the issue



Thank you in advance.
Reply
Reply
post #2 of 17
12/4/04 at 5:37am
Hey man, sorry to hear about your problems. This forum doesnt seem to work for me as a problem-solver, as there are mostly lurkers around here. But, ontopic: the issues you describe can have many causes so to find the whats wrong is to go through a checklist of things...
That means;
1. Check ur drivers; is everything the latest? AGP drivers, VIA drivers, AMD 64 drivers, ATI Drivers, service packs etc etc
2. Bios setting should be ok, dont ask me about this - do a google theres tons of stuff on bios settings
3. Temperature - get some info on yur temp settings; to make sure things are not overheating. That means gpu temp and cpu temp. Look on google for a temp reading app, theres lots of em around...
4. Turn off devices, for starters try disabling your wireless (that's my main headache atm-having an intel wireless on board this rig...) and see if your system is stable with a certain device disabled... if yes, you know what is causing your lock-ups
5. Things are getting more desperate; do a full memory check - theres a little app out there called memory tester or something that goes into dos mode and tests every bit and bite of your memory...takes a LONG while but will eventually tell you if your memory is sucky...

Thats it for now, if I think of anything else I will let you know! Good luck...
Reply
Reply
post #3 of 17
12/6/04 at 6:44am
I think there may be 2 versions of the 1.03 bios: 1.03s1 and 1.03 s2

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=49655


I loaded up bios 1.03s1 , Uninstalled my ati driver, reinstalled it and the I went to amd's website and downloaded the latest cpu driver. So I uninstalled the cpu driver and installed the fresh one. I havent had any problems thus far and I can play doom 3 for hours.

Im not sure if thats what u did exactly as I described above....?? Maybe im just wasting ur time.....lol.
Reply
Reply
post #4 of 17
12/8/04 at 11:32pm
I was wondering - any idea how to figure out what version bios you are using? The regedit method doesnt distinguish between S1 and S2... and I don't think it shows up during boot either...
Reply
Reply
post #5 of 17
12/23/04 at 8:34am
Thread Starter 
Update: still having the same problems

I tried using the new 1.03s1 bios along with sp2 version first. Lasted about 2 hours. Tried again and froze again within first 15 minutes.

Wiped everything, installed a friend's copy of xp sp1 and got same results within 30 minutes.

/sigh

Any ideas what to do now? I heard there's a new bios for the model, but nothing is listed under sager's support page. I'm not too fond of my ~2500 dollar paper weight.

Thanks in advance.
Reply
Reply
post #6 of 17
12/23/04 at 12:24pm
Some possible assistance - go to www.driverheaven.net, download driver cleaner and driver modder then go to ATI's site and download the latest catalyst drivers. Also go to realtek's home page and download the latest AC97 drivers. Install the audio drivers, run the ati installation setup (which won't complete but will uncompress the files to the appropriate directory), run driver cleaner and then run driver modder on the driver folder and install the ATI drivers (I like the Catalyst Control Center but driver modder works on both versions). Reboot each time when prompted. Perhaps this will help solve your problem.

If that doesn't work I'd RMA the laptop - while I've not installed and played WC3 on my Pro-Star D470K I have installed both Half Life 2 and Doom 3 and could play both for hours on end.

I plan on installing WC3 and City of Heroes when I receive my laptop back from Pro-Star sometime next week and will post here with my findings.

Ronin
Reply
Reply
post #7 of 17
12/29/04 at 12:47am
Thread Starter 
Thanks Ronin.

I will try to do that as soon as possible. Its not just WC3...its just one of the games I'm trying to test this out with. Doom3 acts just the same way, as do any other games like sims2, nwn, etc.

I'm in the middle of talking to both PCTorque and Sager Tech right now trying to find a way to solve this little problem. Thanks again.
Reply
Reply
post #8 of 17
12/29/04 at 12:54am
Thread Starter 
Oh and another thing...the bios won't boot up windows at times.... hrmmmm

/sigh
Reply
Reply
post #9 of 17
12/29/04 at 1:03am
Thread Starter 
Oh yea....out of the many crashes I've had in the past few days...one of them was just straight to the desktop. That was a first. It also gave me some sort of a memory error where it couldn't read a spot on the HD.
Reply
Reply
post #10 of 17
12/29/04 at 3:40am
My D470K started dumping memory errors on me shortly before BSOD'ing. I'll letcha know if replacing the hard drive has solved my issue when I get the laptop back after the 1st. I'm even going to go so far as to image the pro-star build as a base reference then try as step by step as I can to see what may be causing the issue.

<sarcasm> I can't wait to see how HL2 performs with the factory ati drivers </sarcasm>
Reply
Reply
post #11 of 17
12/30/04 at 10:42pm
Thread Starter 
FYI, Sager Tech has asked me to RMA it.

I'm going to try to get those new realtek real quick first though.
Reply
Reply
post #12 of 17
12/31/04 at 12:37am
If you're RMA'ing the laptop I don't know that I'd bother downloading and installing drivers unless your going to "ghost" the hard drive before sending it to them. Tech support departments have a nasty habit of wiping and installing a base image of their installation packages on computers as a preventative measure.

Your mileage may vary on this...

Chris
Reply
Reply
post #13 of 17
12/31/04 at 2:43am
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

great cd has most of the major diagnostic programs on it. tech support and home troubleshooting saviour

try the memory testing utilities as well as the hdd utilities. might save you some $$ by sending back only what has failed.
Reply
Reply
post #14 of 17
2/3/05 at 5:37pm
Thread Starter 
Update: I have received the laptop back recently after sending it in for RMA'ing and am having no problems with it yet. I'd say I have spent about 4-5 hours testing it so far. They haven't told me what the problem was yet, but I did send an e-mail in asking out of curiosity.

It seemed it could've been more of a hardware issue than software. It seems that they kept everything intact in terms of the software (bios, windows, appz, music, etc).
Reply
Reply
post #15 of 17
2/3/05 at 5:39pm
Thread Starter 
Another note: it doesn't read the core processor speed at 801mhz anymore like it used to. It's constantly reading 2.20mhz now.
Reply
Reply
post #16 of 17
2/4/05 at 5:50am
Thread Starter 
I have gotten the response from Sager...and they mentioned that it was the system board (motherboard i persume). I hear that ronin got the same fix.
Reply
Reply
post #17 of 17
2/13/05 at 6:25am
Thread Starter 
I have been using the laptop after the fix for hours upon hours upon hours. Not one crash, error, or anything. Been playing a lot of WC3, Doom3, HL2, kotor, and more.

I'm finally happy that the problems fixed. I have also been playing HL2 online for a bit with the wireless, and am not having a problem with that either.
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home