I just experienced my first involuntary restart with the R9700Pro!

[Crawdaddy79]

Ahhh... it makes me reminisce about my 8500 in it's first days of life. Growing pains those were. Happened all the time.. and as new drivers came out, it happened less and less frequently, to the point where it hadn't happened since the Catalyst 2.5 release..

Anyway, so I was playing UT2003, with 4xAA, and at 1280 x 1024, while listening to streaming media with Winamp, and downloading the Raven Shield demo, when all of a sudden, my empty CD tray ejected at the same time my screen went blank.

Next thing I notice I'm looking at my BIOS. It hung up for a second while doing it's S.M.A.R.T. test on my hard drives, and WinXP took a LONG time to get to the blue screen from the loading screen.. But it didn't ask me to send an error report like it normally did with the 8500.

Just to clarify, this is not a technical support question. I was probably just running too many things at once, and something critical got confused. My CPU temp after WinXP came up was only 121 degrees Farenheit, which means it was probably not above it's nominal load temperature of 132 (stock cooling, inefficient case).

Have any other 9700pro owners experienced this???

[Doomtrooper]

Maybe borderline with power requirements or too much multitasking, BTW a tip..SMART enabled slows hardrive access

[Rev_B]

Have you ever ran Prime95 to check if your system is really stable? It´ll will expose any failure for sure. Don´t be too fast blaming on ATi.

[Needa916]

I too had my first reboot and one other game crash, since I got my card. I have been playing for the last month with absolutely no problems.

The 1st time it rebooted was when I enabled npatches or truform in UT2003. It rebooted as soon as the map loaded. No biggie. I launched it again without changing anything, and the game played fine. Then, in MOHAA, I did a quickload, and it chashed with repeating sound - then the MS error report. Right after that, launched Rallisport Challenge, and played fine.

As mentioned above, its not the 9700Pro me thinks, since all other games play flawlessly for hours and hours

[Kruno]

Originally posted by Needa916
I too had my first reboot and one other game crash, since I got my card. I have been playing for the last month with absolutely no problems.

The 1st time it rebooted was when I enabled npatches or truform in UT2003. It rebooted as soon as the map loaded. No biggie. I launched it again without changing anything, and the game played fine. Then, in MOHAA, I did a quickload, and it chashed with repeating sound - then the MS error report. Right after that, launched Rallisport Challenge, and played fine.

As mentioned above, its not the 9700Pro me thinks, since all other games play flawlessly for hours and hours

Exactly the same happened here with Truform and UT03.
Of course it only happened at that 1 time. All the other times I enabled it and disabled it were normal. Just the first time it rebooted my PC.

[Arrowslinger]

Got one this morning while burning a CD and surfing.

No biggy when doing several things at once.

[Rev_B]

If you can live with unstable systems, that´s your choice. I still think something is going wrong there. And no, it´s not normal to have a system crash when doing lots of things at the same time. Not with Win2k or XP at least.

[Arrowslinger]

Originally posted by Rev_B
If you can live with unstable systems, that´s your choice. I still think something is going wrong there. And no, it´s not normal to have a system crash when doing lots of things at the same time. Not with Win2k or XP at least.

LOL

You will learn little grasshopper

[Rev_B]

Suits you, sir.

[Arrowslinger]

Originally posted by Rev_B
Suits you, sir.

Let me get this straight?

Your saying a once in a blue moon restart (mind you while doing a lot of things at once) should never happen?

If it does it once, this is a sign of an unstable system?

Sorry, that would be a computer that no one has.

[KAC]

a boot is no problem especially if u have a 300w psu.. also it is quite normal.. so no sweat.. also leave ur cases open for the summers.. as for using winamp while playing ut.. actually thats the worst idea.. lol.. how did u manage that.. hyperthreading or such crap!..

[Kruno]

Originally posted by Arrowslinger
Let me get this straight?

Your saying a once in a blue moon restart (mind you while doing a lot of things at once) should never happen?

If it does it once, this is a sign of an unstable system?

Sorry, that would be a computer that no one has.

Except for me.

[Rev_B]

Let me get this straight?

Your saying a once in a blue moon restart (mind you while doing a lot of things at once) should never happen?

If it does it once, this is a sign of an unstable system?

Sorry, that would be a computer that no one has.

Yes, let´s get this straight. I suggested to run Prime95 or another stress utility (like burncpu, memtest) and nobody listened to me. Yes people can have a system that seems very stable and they find a little crashing here and there can do no harm. I think not. Most of those systems won´t pass Prime95 torture test - and no, most of the times it won´t crash or reboot, it simply exits with an error message because the cpu calculated the result wrong, without crashing. These are little subtle errors that can give you a reboot or a blue screen.

I learned it the hard way. Some years ago, I had a celeron [email protected] (who hadn´t ) that seemed "perfectly stable" on windows. I was digging into linux and my pc couldn´t compile a kernel, it exited with an error message. WTF? Well, nothing that a 0.1v bump couldn´t solve.

More. I recently upgraded my XP1600+ to a 2400+ on my old faitful ECS K7S5A. I bumped it to 143fsb and it could run a UT2003 benchmark loop for 6 hours! Stable? No. I fired up Prime95 and it exited on 10 mins or so. Set the fsb to 138 Mhz and Prime95 ran for 12 hours until I closed it.

And no, I never had a XP blue screen, a reboot or a freeze with a system that passed 12h Prime95 torture test. So maybe I´m lucky, but I don´t consider a spontaneous reboot or a *random* blue screen that normal.

I was just trying to help.