Water-cooled 865PE + Radeon 9800 XT = rocketship . . . pulls a Challenger

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben Morehead
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Ben Morehead

The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.

The only "symptom" I'm getting from CoreCenter is that from time to
time, the alarm will go off because the 12V rail dips into the 10.5V
range. The alarms have no correlation to the appearance of the garbage
screens. Even if I thought the 12V rail was causing a problem, I don't
see any way to control it via CoreCenter or the BIOS, so I'm not sure
there's anything I can do about that.

Please look over my config and give me some suggestions for fixes.
THANK YOU in advance!

HARDWARE:
MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R w/default "safe" BIOS settings (I tried OCing
just for kicks and it made matters worse: BSOD, a boot-up error that
says "DRAM timing is too tightly . . ." etc.)
Asetek WaterChill system with CPU and Northbridge cooling blocks
(temps in Centigrade are in the low 40's idle, high 40's at load)
P4 2.8GHz w/800MHz FSB (shows up as two CPUs in Device Manager, so I
know Hyper Threading is working)
1GB Corsair Platinum RAM (2x512 in slots 1 and 3 for 800MHz)
Radeon 9800 XT w/256MB RAM (interestingly, the fan on this card is
very quiet. I fully expected to buy a water block for this GPU, but
the fan is so quiet I think I'm going to leave it as-is.)
PS: ThermalTake 480W Silent PurePower
Two 200GB Western Digital SATA drives configured as RAID1 on the
Promise controller (these are MUCH quieter than my old IBM 60GB RAID1
drives)

BIOS SETTINGS (v1.7):
Hyperthreading: Enabled
DRAM Timing by SPD: Enabled
DRAM Timing: 2.5, 4, 4, 8, 8
AGP aperature: 128MB
Spread Spectrum: Enabled
Dynamic OC'ing: Private
Performance mode: Slow
DRAM Frequency: Auto
CPU Bus clock: 200MHz
DDR clock: 400MHz

DRIVERS:
Intel 865: v.5.0.2.1002
Radeon 9800 XT: 6.14.10.6387

Thanks for your help!

Ben
 
Ben Morehead said:
The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.

The only "symptom" I'm getting from CoreCenter is that from time to
time, the alarm will go off because the 12V rail dips into the 10.5V
range. The alarms have no correlation to the appearance of the garbage
screens. Even if I thought the 12V rail was causing a problem, I don't
see any way to control it via CoreCenter or the BIOS, so I'm not sure
there's anything I can do about that.

Please look over my config and give me some suggestions for fixes.
THANK YOU in advance!

HARDWARE:
MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R w/default "safe" BIOS settings (I tried OCing
just for kicks and it made matters worse: BSOD, a boot-up error that
says "DRAM timing is too tightly . . ." etc.)
Asetek WaterChill system with CPU and Northbridge cooling blocks
(temps in Centigrade are in the low 40's idle, high 40's at load)
P4 2.8GHz w/800MHz FSB (shows up as two CPUs in Device Manager, so I
know Hyper Threading is working)
1GB Corsair Platinum RAM (2x512 in slots 1 and 3 for 800MHz)
Radeon 9800 XT w/256MB RAM (interestingly, the fan on this card is
very quiet. I fully expected to buy a water block for this GPU, but
the fan is so quiet I think I'm going to leave it as-is.)
PS: ThermalTake 480W Silent PurePower
Click to expand...

Two wild guesses.

Even though the TT PSU has great specs, that 12v fluctuation is not a good
sign of stability.

Also, the herringbone sounds like it could be overheated or overstressed
video memory.

In a water-cooled system, sometimes people forget that ventilation is still
necessary to allow the remaining air-cooled components to work properly. Not
saying that's your problem, but if the card is overclocked or it's in a hot
air pocket, it's worth checking.
 
Ben Morehead said:
The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.

The only "symptom" I'm getting from CoreCenter is that from time to
time, the alarm will go off because the 12V rail dips into the 10.5V
range. The alarms have no correlation to the appearance of the garbage
screens. Even if I thought the 12V rail was causing a problem, I don't
see any way to control it via CoreCenter or the BIOS, so I'm not sure
there's anything I can do about that.

Please look over my config and give me some suggestions for fixes.
THANK YOU in advance!

HARDWARE:
MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R w/default "safe" BIOS settings (I tried OCing
just for kicks and it made matters worse: BSOD, a boot-up error that
says "DRAM timing is too tightly . . ." etc.)
Asetek WaterChill system with CPU and Northbridge cooling blocks
(temps in Centigrade are in the low 40's idle, high 40's at load)
P4 2.8GHz w/800MHz FSB (shows up as two CPUs in Device Manager, so I
know Hyper Threading is working)
1GB Corsair Platinum RAM (2x512 in slots 1 and 3 for 800MHz)
Radeon 9800 XT w/256MB RAM (interestingly, the fan on this card is
very quiet. I fully expected to buy a water block for this GPU, but
the fan is so quiet I think I'm going to leave it as-is.)
PS: ThermalTake 480W Silent PurePower
Two 200GB Western Digital SATA drives configured as RAID1 on the
Promise controller (these are MUCH quieter than my old IBM 60GB RAID1
drives)

BIOS SETTINGS (v1.7):
Hyperthreading: Enabled
DRAM Timing by SPD: Enabled
DRAM Timing: 2.5, 4, 4, 8, 8
AGP aperature: 128MB
Spread Spectrum: Enabled
Dynamic OC'ing: Private
Performance mode: Slow
DRAM Frequency: Auto
CPU Bus clock: 200MHz
DDR clock: 400MHz

DRIVERS:
Intel 865: v.5.0.2.1002
Radeon 9800 XT: 6.14.10.6387

Thanks for your help!

Ben
Click to expand...

Sounds like the video card is getting too hot. If you're OC'ing it, back it
off a little.
 
Ben said:
The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.
Click to expand...


Sounds like an overheating graphics chip.


-WD
 
Ben said:
The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen.
Click to expand...

I had a brand new 9800 that produced a weird herringbone pattern before it
got to the post screen, sounds like a video card issue to me.. I'd RMA it.
 
Ben Morehead said:
The good even without any overclocking, this new rig is yielding
90 to 100fps at 1600x1200x32bpp with 3D programs!

The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.

BIOS SETTINGS (v1.7):
Hyperthreading: Enabled
DRAM Timing by SPD: Enabled
DRAM Timing: 2.5, 4, 4, 8, 8
AGP aperature: 128MB
Spread Spectrum: Enabled
Click to expand...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Try disabling Spread Spectrum

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20010725/bios_tuning-17.html
( http://makeashorterlink.com/?B51C21166 )

http://www.buildorbuy.org/bios-ssc.html
 
The bad after a few minutes or hours, it suddenly produces a
strange, Herringbone pattern of garbage on the screen. When the
pattern comes up, the keyboard and mouse still work, so I can exit
WinXP by pushing the Start keyboard button, then "U", and "U" again.
So I'm thinking it's not the CPU or the memory.

The only "symptom" I'm getting from CoreCenter is that from time to
time, the alarm will go off because the 12V rail dips into the 10.5V
range. The alarms have no correlation to the appearance of the garbage
screens. Even if I thought the 12V rail was causing a problem, I don't
see any way to control it via CoreCenter or the BIOS, so I'm not sure
there's anything I can do about that.
Click to expand...

the exact same thing happened to me a few days ago, 12V was very
unstable, going up and down between 11.5 and 10, and sometimes dropping
as low as 9.5, while this unstability was occuring my radeon 9700pro
would produce the same type of artifacts that you mentioned.
what i did was to open the box and rearrange the powerconnections a bit,
i have a 550w powersupply, with to cables coming out of it, and i had
alot of heavy stuff connectet to one of them (3 disks, fancontrol etc.
and the radeon itself) i swapped the radeon over to the powercable that
only had some minor stuff attached to it and it's been fine
since....dont ask me why, but atleast it solved the problem. and 12V is
now nice and stable at about 11.8
 
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