wow this is going to be long. please bear with me.

i used to use a GeForce FX 5200 128MB and then upgraded to the abovementioned video card. ive been getting a lot of erratic performance when playing games.

here are my questions:

1. What is better? OMEGA or CATALYST drivers?
For 2 days I was able to get very good performance when I ran ATI Tools and configured my video card to do a bit of overclcking. World of Warcraft ran beautifully for 2 days then all of a sudden the performance sucked without me doing anything. Could some settings have changed? I redid the config but to no avail :(

2. I bought an additional 512MB of RAM totalling my two sticks to 1GB. Unfortunately my MB only recognizes 768. I think this is my fault for I didn't read up a lot on it. Im using an ASUS A7V8X-MX. Just wanna confirm with you guys if this is true. Nonetheless when I installed the RAM, I barely noticed a performance increase in games.

3. What could be the isolated causes of game framerate degradation? RAM went up, Vid card got improved (i know this is a mid range card but 256MB DDR is passable right? and its only world of warcraft..)

4. I got a friend running Guildwars on a GeFore MX4000 without any lag. I'm running mine on the abovementioned and I get spikes! Yikes! Same settings man. Im stupefied because I KNOW I should be getting good framerates (which I did, for 2 days as mentioned in my first paragraph. afterwards it just degraded back. weird. did I do anything wrong?).

thank you my friends! tips would help.

/jayvee
/in need of help

it could be your PSU, but not very likely. how many watts is it? could also be that your bios is outdated. what are the clock speeds on your ram? and when u added 512MB, was it one stick or 2x256. if you have 4x256 in your system you must make sure they are in matching pairs of dimm. typically dimm0 and dimm1 alternate. i.e. it would go dimm0, dimm1, dimm0, dimm1 if you where looking inside your computer. catalyst is what i use....very good. go with that. run sisoft sandra (i think thats the name of it) or cpu-z by cpuid. cpu-z will show you what slots your ram is in. also, what are your ram timings? are they different? that could be a problem.

my MB has 2 DIMM slots. i put 2 512MBs ... but only has a frequency of 266. nonetheless this should improve it right? maybe i should remove one and see how it performs?

ill get back to you on the other info. will run those programs u mentioned. thanks!

oh how can you check if your bios is outdated? i bought mine last year actually.

Hmmm... OMEGA drivers look interesting, but if you're going for stability and reliability, I would recommend against using 3rd-party drivers. Use ATI's own CATALYST for trouble-shooting. Also, did you properly uninstall NVidia's display drivers before installing your new Radeon?

So did your problems start when you put the new RAM in, or were these separate incidents? And what kind of RAM did you put in there? Does the BIOS see all of it or not? Have you tried resetting the CMOS?

So did your problems start when you put the new RAM in, or were these separate incidents? And what kind of RAM did you put in there? Does the BIOS see all of it or not? Have you tried resetting the CMOS?

now that i think of it, it could be RAM related. I didnt reset the CMOS. How do you do this? I'm not too sure how to get around working with my BIOS. If you give me a short step by step to what to do, I can accomplish the task. thanks!

I didnt reset the CMOS. How do you do this?Oh wow. These things come in groups. How do you guys time these things so well?

Look here (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=40988), post #11 for a quick tutorial on CMOS resetting.

quick update for the gents:

i reformatted my PC to get a clean start. i installed the latest OMEGA driver and was able to run the game for about 1 minute then it crashes. sometimes, i get a "signal out of range" error. sometimes the screen just goes blank. i read on the net that if i get a "signal out of range" error i should readjust the resolution on my desktop. i dont know how this actually helps.

on a good note, the game's graphics ran well in that one minute. no lag.

could the problem be my RAM? ihave two 512MB 266 DDRs. I tried running the computer with just one RAM stick to isolate the issue that it could be conflicting RAM chips. still get a crash even with this.

im stumped.

Have you tried the official ATI drivers yet? Try those and see if it fixes the problem. A "signal out of range" error means that you're trying to play the game at a resolution and refresh rate that your monitor doesn't support. What monitor do you have? Do know its max res & refresh?

time for another update:

after reformatting in stalled CATALYST instead of OMEGA and so far ive been getting smooth gameplay.

there is just an error in the startup of Win XP that says "can not load low level device driver. please restart application."

but so far, so good.

there is just an error in the startup of Win XP that says "can not load low level device driver. please restart application."Sounds like some piece of hardware in your system is trying to start up its "wizard" software. :rolleyes: You can use MSCONFIG to get rid of the annoying app.

wow, ive been successfully playing on my ATI with Catalyst 5.9 installed. had very little problems for about a week (around 3 or 4 hangs total which was fixed by a restart). today however, i got the usual "frequency error" and the screen goes blank. i restart the computer and enter some games (WoW) .. to my surprise the graphics degraded. this happened before, which i fixed with an uninstall of the driver + driver cleaner+ reinstall.

im thinking of returning the card in exchange for an NVIDIA... would any of you know what causes this erratic behavior?

Frequency Error?? This is getting weirder by the day...

I'm starting to wonder if you have a bad vid card. Not that ATI is bad, just that your particular card is bad. Do you know if it's still under warranty? Or a return period?

im thinking the same thing too sapp. yes its still under warranty. im trying to change it over the weekend. ive never had this sort of problem before with vid cards. im stumped myself.

will update :) thank you for the help.