Radeon Mobility X700 Black Screen!??

Hi!

Im trying to run NWN on my laptop. But I can only play for 1-2 minutes before the screen goes black! i can hear the background music (at least for a while) but nothing else work.. no ctrl+alt+dlt... not alt+f4... nothing..

I have to Shut down through power button.

I tried with ATI Catalyst Center 6.8... didnt work
Now im using ATI Catalyst 6.7 with omega drivers.. doesnt work..


Can somebody help me please??

my specs are:
Acer Aspire 5024WLMi
ATI Mobility radeon x700 PCIE 128M VRAM
AMD turion 64 ML-34 Processor
1 gB Ram


Strange things though is that when im in "welcome top chance" area... just standing there it works fine.... but when i enter chance,.. i see my char for 5 sec.. then black screen...


I reduced my windows res to 800x600 and lowest settings on nwn. even 16 bit collors.... and it worked finr.. i was running around chance for a while and even spoke to joe the salesman... but then after 5-6 minutes the screen started turning red green and blue (awfull) and everything stopped.....

please if anybody can help.. im studying and dont have Time/money to get a regular PC.

 

Have you tried patching the game? Look on the developer's website and see if there are any, or use Google search. This sounds like a software-based problem.

 

I second that. Go with the latest drivers. Are you overclocking? Does it do it in any other games? If it doesn't do it in other games, then it's almost certainly an NWN problem.

 

it did the same thing on Civilization.. what is strange is that both games worked for hours first timei played.. but the next day this happens...

and howcome it works longer on lower settings?? is there a loop that stores info on card and it crahes when full???

ive tried all kinds of different drivers.... still wont work... Ive got latest patch of the game.... still nothing...

this is really heart braking...

 

At this point, it's probably best to reinstall the game.

 

When using older games on newer video cards I've sometimes had strange problems like this. What usually fixes it is going to the game options and looking for something that has to do with Hardware T&L and turning it off.

 

what is T&L?

Is there a way to buy a new graphics card to the laptop??

 

Hi camonaresi,

Texture and Lighting data - used to be calculated by CPU - afterwards GPU took it over. It usually stands somewhere in video options of the game.

But I think it is nothing to do with the game or the settings since you said that you played it for hours on a previous atempt. It could be something with the overheating though - try start the game immediately when the comp is still cool and see what happens - how long can you play?

It also can be something wrong with the card, or perhaps powerplay settings - for example my powerplay works in a most unusual way - best performance means 105/120 or something on my card?!?! I use NHC to disable the Powerplay and then manually control the power saving modes of my x700.

If you go to start and then Run and then type dxdiag. Go to Display tab and there are two test buttons - try each of them and see if the tests are done properly.

I hope you can find the reason for this,

Cheers,

Ivan

 

what is powerplay?? and i always play te game when i start my comp.. so its not overheating...

by the way. after i restart comp because of crash.. i get "send" "dont send" microsoft thing at startup...

im using SP 2...

 

Hi

I have the very same problem and I've thoroughly researched and tested this matter.

First off my Laptop is a Toshiba M70-164 it has the Radeon Mobility X700M like yours.

I first noticed this with Catalyst 6.5 and then again on 6.6, 6.7, 6.8 and 6.9.

By the time I got to 6.6 I tried every other Catalyst from 5.12 to 6.6 in order to check what was going wrong.

I carefully uninstalled each set even going to safe mode afterwards and using driver cleaner.

So up to Cats 6.4 (inclusive) everything is smooth and good but from there on I just get big crashes, multicolored screens when I start games etc.

It works fine on Windows, watching movies, etc. It even works on OpenGL games and DirectX 8 games but as soon as I start a DX9.0 Game/App(3D Mark 03,05,06) I get the crashes.

Sometimes I'll be able to play for a few minutes, an hour even if I'm lucky, but then I get the crash and odds are after rebooting I'll get it as soons as I execute the Game/App.

This situation saddens me as it affects not only me but many X700M users and it started suddenly from one driver set to another (6.4 to 6.5) so definitely this IS caused by ATI Drivers and despite all the Feedback reports I've sent through ATI's website the problem isn't even on the 'Known Problems' list after all this time!

 

The Radeon X700-equipped Toshiba M70 is known to have problems, so you should probably contact Toshiba on this issue.

 

Hey Chaz!

I didn't know about that god =(

First the wireless card then this!

If you could PLEASE ellaborate some more and provide me some informations, links or whatever on this I'd be grateful! As I'd like to fix this within the warranty period of course!

Thx in advance.

 

Hi Unleashed,

Your info on the Cat 6.4 drivers is extremely interesting. I have been having trouble with my X1400, which looks very much like overheating. It has happened twice that while the machine is idleing for 6hrs+ the screen goes all green and the machine is still working for a while, but I have to reset it to get the screen back. When I do, I instantly get the same problem, but if I leave it for 15 minutes it goes away.

Although this seems like a simple overheating problem I have tried hard to recreate it but I can't (the machine runs fine for 12hrs+, even running 3DMark!!)! So far I have had the laptop for 5 months and this has happened twice, the first time it was running really quite cool (powerplay down and CPU on lowest speed). Therefore, I can't really believe it is heat. It may be a Catalyst problem like you describe (especially as your problem also persists after reboot).

Can you let me know more details of your research? Any idea what the problem is? In the meantime I will drop to Cat 6.4 and see if I get my green screen anytime in the near future!

My original problem thread is here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=69707&highlight=charlesb80

Thanks!

Charles

 

How about installing earlier drivers?

I don't think our problems are quite the same as Chaz said my laptop has known issues and might I add, it's not only with the graphics card!

You should test with as many different drivers as you can. Try 1 set per week and see how it goes.

Also, did you check the known issues list @ ATI for the Catalyst sets?

 

Right, so as I pursued (still) a solution to this problem I went to Toshiba's official support page for my laptop and to my surprise there was a display driver update dated 29/08/06 "ATI Windows XP 8.203 World Wide".

"YEY!" - I thought. So I went ahead downloaded it and proceded to the uninstallation of the ones I had (Cats 6.4) rebooted to safe mode, cleaned with driver cleaner, back to normal and installed the new set.

Now comes the fun part! - To my surprise after installing and rebooting as required I noticed these drivers did NOT have CCC, "oh well" - I thought, then I went ahead to check their official version which was 6.14.10.6587 AKA Catalyst 5.12 !!!

WTF is wrong with Toshiba?? There's something fishy here! They release a driver update practically 1 year after they released the laptop and the drivers are 10 MONTHS OLD???

 

So I dont get it... would older drivers work???

 

The older drivers will work fine, yes. However, I wouldn't go all the way back to 5.xx. Catalyst 6.3 are very good.

 

Ok.. im currently on Omega Drivers... should I change to an older Catalyst??

and now Its even happening in windows... could it be a windows error??? It goes black even when Im just sufring the net! Im never buying a leptop again.. Cost me about 1000 pounds and it aint even working right!!!

 

Sounds like a warranty issue . . you will probably have to send in your machine in for repair. This isn't the first time I heard about problems concerning the Toshiba M70 with the Radeon X700 as I previously stated.