Damaged vid card?

Logla · Jan 9, 2005, 08:22 AM

Ok, so I just finished putting all my components into my new case and fired her up for the first time this morning.

To my horror on the POST screen there were what looked like blue colons : all down the screen. Then after the post the pc moves to the SATA RAID init screen and that screen was basically just a load of 0s all over the screen with other random characters all over.

The windows splash screen looks a little corrupted but not too bad and within windows itself, all looks ok except for a very faint checker effect accross the screen. This is hardly noticeable though. 3d is a different story though.

All the colours are wrong and theres artifacts all over the place, yet the gpu temp is only 22c - so its not a heat problem.

What is more worying that in order to get the machine to boot, I have to take the card out, power up and down again, re-insert the card and then it boots.

Is my vid card dead or could it be something else like the cpu or mobo?

Judas · Jan 9, 2005, 01:50 PM

strange... i would think it was video card...... only way to know is to pick up a cheap pci card for diagnostics... or another vid card

Sargentwhitey · Jan 9, 2005, 01:54 PM

It's possible the power supply is no good... I remember a while back my computer was working fine.. then some sort of *pop* happened and artifacts were suddenly all over the screen.... I first thought it was my video card or agp slot.. but found out that my power supply had gone bad... got a new one and everything was just as beautiful as before

Logla · Jan 9, 2005, 03:18 PM

Nah not the psu - OCZ Powerstream 520w tested fine. I tried my old Antec after your recommendation and it makes no difference.

I'm begining to think its the ram on the card or one of the pipes as the artifacts appear in exactly the same the same place on the screen at all times. The bit that really worries me though is the zeros and the random ASCII characters that appear in dos mode.

Shuflie · Jan 9, 2005, 03:36 PM

If you have a VIA chipset try playing with the AGP driving control value, be careful though since if you put too high a figure in there it could stop your computer from posting or damage your card. I have a Gigabyte K8VT800 pro MB and set the AGP driving control value to AA for my X800pro, the auto value had picked something like 9C which didn't allow fastwrites to be enabled and powerDVD locked the computer up when hardware acceleration was enabled. Setting to EA as suggested on another forum just resulted in a single continuous beep on power up. Setting to AA seems to work fine for me.

Logla · Jan 9, 2005, 05:43 PM

intel chipset and it gets worse. I uninstalled the omega drivers and tried the ati drivers just to see if it made any difference.
After uninstalling tthe old drivers and reinstalling the ati drivers all appears ok. When I reboot after the install, the machine goes into powersave when logging onto xp.

I think the card is shafted and possibly the mobo and cpu as well - could be static damage.
Gutted.

Logla · Jan 11, 2005, 02:42 PM

Update: Definately the card. I tried an nvidia gforce 5200 today and it works without any of the artifacting or wierd characters.
Gonna have to try for RMA.

EDIT AND UPDATE NUMBER 2!!:

I fixed it. Bemused with the idea of an RMA I decided to do some diags. I checked the card and found one of traces from one of the ram chips to the gpu to be damaged - I have no idea how I did this.

I scraped away a little bit of of the trace to reveal the shiny bit underneath. Then I smeared as3 (because its conductive) all over the damaged part and wiped off the excess. Plugged the card in and all the nastiness disappeared.

It works fine now and I'm amazed not to mention pleased although pee'd off at shelling out 40quid for an nvidia card just to make sure the mobo and cpu weren't hosed.

Ah well.