VGN-A197VP Graphic Lockup's`

[CrunchyArmadillo]

Hi,

I've had my Vaio for just over amonth or so now and in general I'm very happy with it.

My only concern was inital problems with gfx lockups. Most notable was when running Doom3 or DAoC. After a bit of testing I found a work-around using the Omega Drivers set and declocking the video cards core clock speed to 351 with Radlinker.

Obviously while this provides stability I was a bit disapointed. Given the intermittent and abruptness of the lockup's and the success of the core de-clock I decided that overheating/cooling was the main problem.

I wasnt happy with the control of the system fan. Even though it was set to performance I can still hear it (the fan) speeding up and slowing down according to demand rather than remaining on full (my definition of performance).

Are there extrernal software utilities that would allow user control over this or will Sony release an improved control panel interface?

[ZyRaIN]

Hi,

I dont think that it is a heating problem if I use the same drivers and play example: Farcry 1 hour my temperature is about 50 - 52 degrees, but the only thing that I dont understand on my system is that when I start playing the game, it's hacking alot but when i've played maybe 5 - 10 min its all just fine and no "hacks" what can this be ? every time it does this the hdd is working a lot, what can be the solution to this ? quicker hdd ? more ram ? I dont think that it is the gfx card which is the problem because I can run the game in high resolution.. I dont have a problem with this because I realy dont play that much, but was just wondering..

[CrunchyArmadillo]

I'll put my hands up and say I dont really know the problem . What I posted up was what I did to achieve stability. I know what you mean about the hard disk but I dont think thats a problem, more of a system limit.

One example of one of the types of crashes was where sever pixelation would occur over the vertexs in 3d scenes. To me it seemed to be related to anti-aliasing but I dont really know.

The other obvious result was where the VPU recoverer popped up a window saying the driver had recovered from a lockup.

[TygerTyger]

My initial response is that it may be an Omega driver problem. Try going back to the originals if you possibly can (if they aren't too out of date). The response of motherboards in general (and indeed Windows XP) is to restart the computer if it overheats rather than lockup, but there always exceptions
You will only get official Sony support when using their own drivers so it's a step forward if you can't fix it yourself.