I decided to republish a very long but detailed comment from an Ati user, Casondra, on May 5, 2009, regarding the Ati2dvag problem that I used to face – which resulted in me trashing my previous computer completely.
I wrote to Casondra much earlier asking her if she would mind me republishing her comment in a separate post because the old post was getting a little lengthy in comments, and she agreed it was a good idea too.
“I figure the more information there is out there about this, the fewer people who will go insane looking for answers,” – Casondra
So here it is:
My husband just got a custom built system, all parts fully compatible (verified through several sources), but the video card seems to have issues. When running a streaming video fullscreen, or a video editing software (with inline preview), the system hangs for a bit, then you get an error: “VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands.”
So, I updated the drivers (not only for the card, but for the display as well). No change.
So, I lowered pretty much all of the settings in the Catalyst Control Center, and verified overclocking was turned off. Nothing.
I swapped the VGA to DVI (I knew this wasn’t the issue, but for the sake of things thought I would mention it).
I found that having a VIA chipset with an ATI card has issues with the AGP being default, so I switched it to PCI to PCI bridge. Still nothing. Except, this time when I tested a streaming video, I a blue screen saying that the file ‘ati2dvag’ caused a serious issue with windows, and windows had shut down. That my graphics drivers had been caught in an infinite loop, and the file ‘ati2dvag’ was to blame. What is that file even for? I have never heard of it until now. Am I only getting this blue screen now because I swapped the vga to dvi?
All this just makes me wonder if these ‘fixes’ just made things worse.
- ASROCK 4COREDUAL-SATA2 motherboard
- Powercolor ATI Radeon HD4350 video card
- Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 cpu
- Crucial Rendition 2GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 ram (1 stick)
- Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB SATA2 7200RPM 8.9MS 8MB hdd (storage drive)
- RetailPlus+ 465W Dual Fan psu
The main hdd is a Maxtor IDE drive, 120mb. Not sure of other specs on it, had the computer apart so much lately I don’t feel like opening it again to check.
It’s running Windows XP Home, though if I recall the disks we have are SP2, and it refuses to go to SP3 on his computer, though I switched over fine. Is it possible the solution, for us, is as simple as getting SP3 on his computer? Mine doesn’t have an external graphics card, so I can’t test that theory.
I did see most posts about these issues involve cards with fans, but this card doesn’t have one, and never seems to overheat. (You can touch it briefly and not get burned). So I can’t very well clean a fan I don’t have, not to mention as it is a new card (out of the box about a week), even if it had a fan, it couldn’t be dirty so fast.
I also notice some people have problems with not having a good enough psu to cover their demands. But surely 465W is enough?
I would yank the card altogether, but his motherboard doesn’t have built in video adapters, so it would make the computer useless.
Even though we only paid like 45 bucks for the card, I am not fond of having to RMA it, if it is even eligible (since the ATI/AMD site says system hangs and such aren’t covered by their warranty. I am hoping the retailer thinks otherwise on that). But it seems the only option left is to RMA and get an NVidia card. Or am I wrong?
Oh, the system also has in it a WinFast TV Tuner card, a soundblaster live! 5.1 audio card (which was hell trying to find drivers for, since the website says the card isn’t even there, til I realized I could manual force them from the list instead of searching), and a telephone/modem card (He says ‘Just in case’, though I doubt he will ever use it since we are on cable internet). I don’t think these cards are causing issues, but I guess you never know.
The one noticeable thing about this problem (in my experience) was that it seemed to go away for a while, only to reappear (again) after several months. Temperature spikes, slowdowns, and BSODs. And trust me, I tried just about everything that everyone has spoken about in the comments.
If you have any of your experiences, posting a new comment on this new page could be helpful to someone out there. Good luck.