Quadro4 750 XGL trouble

[BrainWalker]

Wow, there certainly are a lot of annoying emoticons...

Anyway, here's the skinny: My current PC is a six year old obsolete jalopy, and there's no way it can handle the DCC applications I need to run nowadays. So, last week I ordered some hardware so I could build myself a new, less-crappy system. The problem is that, apparently, my motherboard and my Quadro4 don't seem to be on quite the same wavelength. In the bios setup, before installing anything, I got two pair of vertical lines running through the background. These lines turned to strings of dollar signs during Windows XP Home installation, and once actually in Windows, things crashed pretty much instantly. A friend of mine was helping me with the building, and we tried everything we could think of. We reinstalled things, uninstalled things, updated the bios, flashed the bios, and tweaked every setting available, but we kept getting the same damn thing the whole time.

Now here's the surreal part. My Quadro4 worked fine in his Athlon system, and his ATI Radeon worked fine in my P4 system. What's up with that? We pretty much exhausted the extent of our knowledge and online resources and tech support haven't exacly been the most helpful sources. Thus I bring my query to the people. Hopefully my fellow man is more helpful than "the man".

Here's the rest of the relevant hardware, since I know I'd get my ass kicked if I forgot to mention it up front:
Mobo: MSI 865PE NEO2-PLS (i865PE Chipset)
CPU: P4 3.0Ghz w/HT (Northwood)
Memory: 1024MB (512x2) Corsair ValueSelect DDR400
Sound: Creative Audigy ZS2
Other semi-relevant stuff: a DVD burner, a DVD-rom drive, a 120 Gig SATA HD and a 400watt power supply.

Hopefully I didn't forget too much important relevant information. I hope I can squeeze out some answers here, 'cause I'd really hate to be out that much money with nothing to show for it. I suppose I could just get a different motherboard, but that puts me out even more money... ahh, it'd be nice to not have financial problems.

:afro3:

[ricercar]

You describe a video card hardware failure.
- Stripes of pixels in POST screens or BIOS setup (e.g. when no drivers are installed) usually indicates video card RAM failure.
- Stripes of characters in POST screens or BIOS setup (e.g. when no drivers are installed) usually indicates video BIOS failure.

Variance in manufacturing tolerances can make your motherboard reveal bad video RAMs that are not detectable on your friend's motherboard. Ditto bad BIOS. I have owned and tested perhaps 80 NVIDIA cards. Cards with known BIOS and RAM failures do not always appear defective on all motherboards, even within the same model. To wit:

- An ASUS V9900TD (NV30) with bad DRAM works fine on a A7N8X-E Deluxe, but displays vertical stripes of pixels on a A7N8X Deluxe.

- Two different NV35 NVIDIA engineering samples (5900 Ultra) with bad DRAM operate properly on a A7N8X-E Deluxe, but fail with video artifacts on another A7N8X-E Deluxe bought off the same retail shelf the same day.

- Perhaps a dozen NV25 (GeForce4 Ti4x00/Quadro4 AGP4X) NVIDIA engineering samples with known bad BIOS or known bad DRAMs passed over my test bench. These defective cards produced artifacts or failed to produce any video on Crush17/18 IGP reference boards (nForce2) or consumer Shuttle SN41G2 and ASUS A7N8X, A7N8xE, A7N8X/VM, A7N8X/VM-400. However, on nForce1 boards (MSI K7N420 Pro and Crush12 engineering samples), most of these NV25 boards operated without visible defect and without apparent performance hit in synthetic benchmarks.

If you don't like your friend too much, perhaps he will trade his good Radeon for your fubar Quadro ...

[BrainWalker]

Hmmm... that's actually pretty interesting. As a graphics designer and a web designer, I'm all too familiar with the concept of software tolerance, but I hadn't considered the possibility of differences in hardware tolerance.

If you don't like your friend too much, perhaps he will trade his good Radeon for your fubar Quadro ...
Well, there's two things wrong with that. The first being that my Quadro4 is not only worth more than his Radeon, but it's also far more useful for my purposes. Secondly, he invited me to his home and let me eat his food and drink his Gatorade while we stayed up all night working on trying to get this thing to work, so I wouldn't really feel right taking advantage of him. Besides, he's not as dumb as he looks, and he really has no use for a Quadro anyway.

Newegg has a pretty solid return policy, so I was thinking about getting a replacement for the video card. I was also considering getting a refund on the mobo and getting an Abit or Asus board... although I might not do that now, in light of this information...

I'll have to sleep on it.