My Acer notebook has a ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Graphics card with 256MB VRAM. Playing games with this high end card is always a treat ! However from the past few weeks, I am facing a weird problem.
It all started when I was playing one of my favorite games : Railroad Tycoon 3. This game was running normally for a few days. One day the screen suddenly went blank and the best I could do was to restart the system (after doing a forceful shutdown).
I tried the game few more times and ended with the same result; Display blanks out and doesn’t respond to any keyboard input, not even Ctrl+Alt+Del. I thought the problem was more with the game rather than the graphics card.
Few days back I downloaded the trial version of Caesar 4 (Another favorite game 🙂 ). Guess what ? The display blanked out again !
I am trying hard to find the reason for this weird problem ! One thing I noticed is that the GPU (not CPU, CPU performance seems to be normal) does make a lot of sound when I start these games ! Does it blank out after the GPU reaches some max temperature ?
Is there a problem with the driver ? Also can somebody suggest me a nice tool to diagnose the graphics card health ? The Direct X diagnostic seem to be reporting no problems !
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Hmm… Try this utility and let me know.
Did you try out that utility?
Yup I did run the test, few hours back. Did the stress test for 3 min (I was not sure how much time it was going to take, the website snapshot showed 40 min !!)
Also did a benchmark, it came out like this :
I also reinstalled windows and ran 2 games, as of now its working fine.
Thanks for the tool 🙂
Looks like you had a driver issue.. 🙂
not sure, still have to checkout one of the games i.e railroad tycoon 🙂
by the way i see one of your comment from ubuntu ! how is it, I have been using Suse from some time