is my Radeon 4850 underpowered?

[skunkmunroe]

Hello,

I recently bought myself an ATI Radeon 4850 powercolor graphics card.  I have had a few issues with the card not recognising my Samsung SyncMaster monitor - even though the system recognises it and all the correct drivers are installed.

The graphics card will initially recognise the monitor but if I run a game (such as Brothers in Arms Hells Highway which is quite demanding) the graphics card will throw up an error message and says that I have a 'default VGA Monitor' and reset my resolution to a much lower setting.  It basically seems to lose track of my monitor and the game will ultimately crash.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4ghz processor and 2gb DDR2 Ram.  I have a 450w power supply - don't think it is a particularly great model.

Does this seem like a power supply issue to any of you guys?  The 4850 is not overheating, running temperatures are pretty good so I don't think that is the cause. 

I am thinking of getting a better more powerful PSU as I think the 4850 is perhaps not able to gain enough power from my system.  But this is just a guess as to the cause of my problem - can anyone perhaps confirm/disprove my suspicions?

Really appreciate any help you can provide.

[BC_Programmer]

your graphics driver is crashing. the default Video driver, which windows uses in this case, doesn't support DDC (data Display channel) and recognizes all monitors as Default VGA.


Try updating the driver- or reinstalling to an older version, such as that included on the CD included with the card.

[skunkmunroe]

Thanks for the help, but....there doesn't seem to be much difference between using the latest driver and the driver supplied with the card.  The same thing is happening, one minute it recognises my SyncMaster and the next it has reverted to 'default VGA Monitor'.  But, it will then revert back to SyncMaster .

Because it recognised it one minute, then lost it, then recognised it again - that's what made me think perhaps it was a power issue.  Admittedly I'm not particularly technical so don't really know what I'm talking about.

[dslgeek]

Well, it is a lot easier to pop the card that take out the PSU. Even a wimpy video card should not behave that way. Even tho the card is not overheating, it is overheated. I men that it has a defect that is heat driven. I am an old hardware tech and  a few times have I found a PSU that was underpowered. And when that happened other things would happen. It has got to be the video card or just maybe the cable that goes to the monitor, but you must have already tried that.