diegamel

Hello

My new computer is a mystery machine. It suddenly stopped working in the way that it on most boots gets stuck at "Detecting Arrays" in MediaShield screen right after pushing powerbutton and goes nowhere. If it does go through to Vista, playing games for 5 seconds it freezes and have to shut down by force.

Mystery is, that it worked fine the first day I bought it, the second day it started doing this, and third day after doing all kinds of stuff (taking video card out and putting back, formatting etc.) it started working as suddenly as the problem arrived, and I played games happily for over a month. Today it suddenly started again and nothing seems to work. 5 seconds and freeze.

I've read a lot about ATIs driver problems but I am pretty sure its no more a driver problem because I tried a million different drivers before, now using Catalyst 8.8 to be sure of stability, and it started doing it again suddenly anyways. I don't have a chance to try different hardware parts since no one I know has a desktop here. I also can't send my computer for refund and/or replace a part due to living far from the place it came from and it would take ages to get it back.

So I'd like to know what things can be tested with software (is there any way to test video card problems with software??). So many things could be of motherboard problems just as well so its kind of hard to determine. Temperatures are completely fine and low. And I have many fans in the case.

One weird fact there was from the beginning was that when I format, Vista does not detect my 4870X2 and no drivers are installed before I spesifically download catalysts. This already a symptom of something weird going on with the vid card?

Help.

Edit1: I just noticed that in ATI overdrive it temperature is only like 60-85'C idle but it says GPU activity is 146% constantly (the meter is on red). Anything strange about this?

Edit2: added pictures to see stats better

Edit3: installed new catalyst 8.12 to try. Same thing, game freezes after a couple of seconds, but now it also gave a bluescreen, atikmdag.sys ... this any help??

Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz 12MB Cache 1333MHz FSB
Processor Cooling : Alienware® Standard System Cooling
Power Supply: Alienware® 1000 Watt Multi-GPU Approved Power Supply
Graphics Processor : Single Graphics Card - 2GB GDDR5 ATI® Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 – Dual GPU Technology
Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 2 x 2048MB
Motherboard: Alienware® Approved NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI
Includes PCI-Express 2.0, DDR3 Memory, and Support for Intel 1600 FSB
Operating System: Genuine Windows® Vista Home Premium - English

Attached Images

	1.jpg (83.9 KB, 0 views)
	2.jpg (27.4 KB, 0 views)
	3.jpg (72.5 KB, 0 views)
	4.jpg (66.6 KB, 2 views)

diegamel

I just realized that if I dont put games in fullscreen they work. Does this mean something?