ATI 9600XT problems..

[justinone]

My ATI radeon card has been realy bugging me lately. it keeps having VPU errors
very oftern when playing games and causes me to restart before i can play another game. gameplay freezes, sometimes returns with a black screen but i can hear gameplay resuming. monitor shuts down completely and pc stays on but unresponsive... these happen during 30 minutes or so of gaming. PC is quite unstable at the moment to - have ran virus scans. Help!

ATI Radeon 9600XT 256mb
2GB Ram
3.0 GHz pentium 4 HT CPU
Windows XP Home SP2

 

[nickslick74]

Can you check your GPU temp and see if it is overheating?

 

[justinone]

how do i check my GPU Temp? It says 0 Degrees C on the ATI toolbar Icon. This happends everytime now on bf1942. works fine and then i get a VPU error saying the graphics adaptor has stopped responding. Its preventing me from playing anything :-(

 

[nickslick74]

To me (and I could be wrong) it sounds suspiciously like your video card is overheating. It also be that your CPU is overheating as well, but less likely. Lastly, it could be that your power supply is dying. You could test that by swapping in a know ggod or new psu.

For the possible overheating, have you opened the case and blown out all of the dust lately? Also, try gaming with the case open and a fan blowing out it and see what happens. I think you monitor all of your temps through a program called Everest, you can Google it for a free download.

 

[justinone]

Oh dont worry, found the problem. It was my ATI Catalyst that had been corrupt and did not read properly. Thanks anyway.