Video Card Problem, need a fix

Recently, while playing various games, some of which are not very graphics intensive, the program will first freeze, followed by return of sound (that would have occured right after the freeze) and the screen turning black Several seconds later, the screen will switch from black to "no signal", and the speakers will emit a high pitched set of squeeks, that play in a loop. When I reboot, the resolution will have set itself to 800x600, instead of my LCD's native resolution of 1280x1024. I have installed the newest drivers for my card, tried system restore back to before the problem, then reinstalled the drivers again, but this still occurs. I plan to try wiping the hard drive next. Is there a solution anyone here can think of?

My Specs:
3ghz Pentium 4 processor
Asus P4P800 se MB
1024mb 3200 Ram
ATI Radeon X850 video card, about a year and a half old

 

You arent overclocking anything are you? it sounds like instability due to OCing but if you arent OCing then i dunno

wow we have a ridiculously similar setup lol

 

No I'm not Over clocking it as far as I know. Another odd thing is, sometimes it appears as if I have two ATI monitor programs running in my bottom right corner. Could it be possible I have two sets of drivers installed conflicting?

 

If your DirectX version was up-to-date, then this sounded like a display driver issue.
Prior to installing the new drivers, do you uninstall the existing ones first and preferably reboot afterwards then install the new drivers? Is your sound card an integrated one or a separate add-in card?

Also remember, if the card is not very new, sometimes installing the newest drivers for a card that is like a year or more older could also cause problems too, so newest drivers are not always the better choice, this is generally true of Nvidia cards so I am not sure about the ATI cards/drivers.

 

I have direct X 9.0c, as far as I know that's the most recent version, since 10 is Vista only, right? I usually don't uninstall previous drivers beforehand, so that might be where the problem lies. I think I'll wipe my computer anyway though, It's gotten pretty bogged down in hard drive space. Anyone know what the optimal driver edition for the X850 is?

 

Check ATI's site and install the latest drivers as your card is fairly new so the newest drivers should be the best.

Good Luck with the fresh install...

~TL :cool