Undead X800: any hope left?

mbonci

Half an year ago I had some serious problems with my ATI card (a Powercolor X800 GTO 256MB AGP, which I had bought about one year earlier), and, in short, it didn't die, but since then it's been in a rather vegetable state. So I decided to put it aside and use a very old spare card my brother happened to have and just forgot about the X800.

Yesterday I decided to give it a last try, and it simply worked just as new. I mean, for a while... Today I had some unexpected reboots, but thought it was because of driver instability, as after rebooting all worked just as normal. But after one of these sudden reboots it blew up to space again.

Now here are the facts I can give about it:
- It's just one, but for some reason, Windows thinks it's eight. Really odd... (This seems to be at the root of the problem.)

- It works in safe mode, or after a normal boot with no video driver installed. Simply turning all video acceleration off without uninstalling the ATI drivers doesn't work.
- If any accelerated driver is installed (no matter what version or whether it's official or not), when booting, Windows flashes a BSOD after the logo screen goes out, and instantly reboots.
- It crashes under Linux too.
- Changing BIOS settings or unplugging other hardware makes no difference.
- PSU is not the problem. I bought a more powerful one but nothing changed.
- MB seems not to be the problem either, as I had no problems with the old video card, and even the X800 worked just fine for almost a whole day, under normal conditions.
- The first days after the problem started, it worked fine for a minute or two after leaving the computer off for some hours.
- There's an intermitent screeching noise coming from the card's fan (don't know if it has anything to do with the problem). It seems to get worse when the weather is colder.
- Most of the times it rebooted I was starting a video or opening the TV tuner window.

Here's the original thread I started 6 months ago (it doesn't add much to these facts):
http://www.driverheaven.net/windows-...just-sure.html

So, the question... Is there any hope left for it?
I'm a student, and at the moment I'm not working. Buying new hardware is not an option. So I'd really love to hear I can fix it somehow...

Mousey

I doubt you can fix it, sounds like a damaged GPU. I had a similair problem on one of my old X1550s except there was so much distortion on anything to do with windows after i installed the driver it just wasn't workable.

So unless you have a spare GPU and are VERY handy with a soldering iron i think your'e outta luck bud :/

mbonci

Damn, you're probably right...

Any clue on what might have caused such damage? (I've never overclocked it and I never really used it heavily for long periods.)

kris23

a high heat card like that couldve gone out if it was regularly ran at its maximum temp threshold, right at those temps, no more than 5 years use....

Mousey

Looks like it's time to get a job :P
Even i've got a job and i'm 15 lol. See my specs? The only things in there i didn't buy are the CPU and Cooler which i got for christmas

mbonci

Heheh lucky kid. You're 15 and you live in the UK. But I'm in CS college full time and I live in Brazil. (And most important, my parents never quite liked computers and video games...)

mbonci

Well nevermind. Just squeezed some money out of my pocket and bought a new card. GeForce 6600 LE 256MB. Looks good for my needs. Maybe almost as good as my deceased X800. (Or... isn't it?... )

Mousey

If it serves the purpose it should be fine for the time being
And i'm just hunting down some benchmarks of the X800 and see how it stacks up if it's compared to a 6600.

candle_86

the 6600LE is a 4pp card, though most of them do unlock to all 8 pipes, id do that first, see if you can unlock the 4 pipes that are locked on your NV43 core, and this will give you a normal 6600, but its closer to the 9700pro in preformace than the x800.

CDsDontBurn

i had a co-worker of mine who recently had the same issue you are experiencing. it's not really an issue with the hardware of the card having gone out. it's a faulty BIOS of the video card. as to what caused this, it could be a number of different things.

essentially, there are two things you can do: flash the BIOS of the video card or RMA the card if it is still under warranty.

As for the 6600LE card, as long as it serves your basic needs i would just say you keep running that card until you figure out what you want to do with the x800. I would not recommend you do as candle_86 said as that may damage your current 6600LE card, especially since you're tight on cash. because if you do and it doesn't work, then you'd have two bad cards!

if i still had my old x800xt pe, i'd extract a copy of the BIOS, and send it to you, but i no longer have it.

SieRobin

Unfortunately it plugs into a PCI-E slot, I doubt you have more than one PCI-E slot. However if you do, try and plug it into another PCI-E slot, then see what happens. Also did you try and uninstall the GFX out of the Device Manager and see what happens?

Also, do you OC your card? If you do, underclock it or you can see if CCC is automatically overclocking it. It could keep tripping the VPU Recovery and crashing the card.

Anyway, to me it doesn't sound like it's the GPU to be honest, but I could be wrong.