Phooey, I think my Geforce 4 Died :(

[ChrisRay]

Phooey, In my baby machine, its been using a Geforce 4, But all of a sudden its unable to play 3d aplications, Some games When it gets into the 3d scene, it freezes Completely for 10 second intervals. Starts up. Freezes,

Aquamark, 3dmark ect, Display garbelled jumbled messes,. Tried reinstalling Everquest and software, The only 3d thing that seems to work properly is the Direct3d test in DXdiag. (My spinning cube works!)


It just started doing this. I cant see how I would have made any changes to the system. I guess I'm gonna have to put the ole Ati Radeon 8500 All in Wonder back in there.

[Edge]

Hmm, that's strange, usually the videocard doesn't just half-die like that. Wonder what would cause that...

Oh well, the next generation of cards should be out in a few months, so hopefully you'll have an excuse to upgrade now ;)

[The Baron]

Sure it half-dies like that. Pretty often.

[digitalwanderer]

Sounds more like a virus or spyware infection than a card dying, check your start-up proggies and sweep your machine.

[ChrisRay]

YOu sure dig? I have heard of the 3d side of cards dying alot? I just wonder what else troubleshooting I could do at this point,


Drivers, Reinstall, DX game reinstalls ect

It does DirectDraw, But any kind of 3d hardware acceleration is borked.

[TheTaz]

Maybe try turning off Fast Writes?

Also try turning off any video caching or video shadowing in the bios.

Bout all I can think of if you've reinstalled DX and tried different drivers.

Taz

[Edge]

Originally posted by The Baron
Sure it half-dies like that. Pretty often.

Really? I haven't heard that many cases of where the card has problems but still works (unless you're overclocking), usually it just goes out altogeather. Wonder what causes it...a degredation of the bus or something?

[Gator]

got a spare hard drive? Put in the spare, format, install windows, install drivers fresh. At leas tthat way you can see if the software is simply corrupted. Why the spare drive? Might save you some aggrivation in case that don't work.

[The Baron]

One of the memory chips has died.

[ChrisRay]

Bummer. Can only guess its the card, Tried FX 5900 and Radeon 8500 AIW DV, And both are working just fine and dandy. Bummer :( Losing a Geforce 4 is a sad sad day :(


*throws in a snide comment*

Oh ya for all you people who think Nvidia is sabotaging ATi drivers, My ATI card installed fine and dandy with a nice little Nvidia uninstall:o

[TheTaz]

Originally posted by ChrisRay
Bummer. Can only guess its the card, Tried FX 5900 and Radeon 8500 AIW DV, And both are working just fine and dandy. Bummer :( Losing a Geforce 4 is a sad sad day :(

Yeah... that sucks.

My 9800 Pro took a shiz when I swapped out 512MB of memory for a Gig on my nForce 1. I must have accidently zapped it with static electricity or something. Years of swapping hardware and that's the first time I've ever zapped something. (2D and 3D had a faint 'grid like' anomaly after swapping the system RAM... Swapped old RAM back... same thing... put card in another machine... same thing... so card was fried)

Fortunately, even though I was past the 30 Days to return the card to Best Buy and get a replacement... (Was like 50 days after purchase), I was able to say it was an X-mas gift and didn't get opened / installed until the same day, and told them it was DOA. LOL. So, I got a new 9800 Pro without having to RMA it though ATi. :D (New card worked fine, confirming old card was messed up)

If anything... it taught me to be way more careful, which I should have known in the first place. Years of swapping out hardware CAN make you overconfident in "bending the precautionary rules". ;)

Regards,

Taz

[SmuvMoney]

ChrisRay, sorry to hear that man. Losing a high-end card is no fun - I accidentally killed a 9700 Pro over a year ago while modding it. If it is any solace, the 5900NU, 5700U, and even 9800 Pros are well-priced at the moment.

[john19055]

When my TI4600 finally died ,it started out by starting a game and then would go to desk top and then it got where it would'nt play no 3D games but would start up in windows and about a week later it just would'nt even boot in to windows,it just died.

[Hunter32]

Check and see if the fan is working, GPU could be over heating.

[Soylent]

The ever bigger metal heat-sinks as well as non-conductive thermal past should protect most components from static electricity(a lot of charge will build up at spiky protrusions and leave the main bulk of the sink alone, which is good because chips are usually at a big flat surface below the sink).

The chips you need to be most carefull about are probably exposed memory chips and sound cards(which don't yet need sinks).

Good thing we have hair or we would have zapped a lot more computer parts :eek: (hairs are very tiny and charges will congegrate there. The high electric fields rip some atoms and molecules appart and the oppositely charged ion will neutralize a charge on your hair and the other ion will fly off and eventually get led to ground via the electrical fixtures. Without hair we would not loose charges as quickly and they would be more evenly spread across the body).