6800 Ultra artifacts

[Sandman187]

First off my video card is a Nvidia reference (S-media) 6800 Ultra, with dual DVI ports and a single s-video port.

I was having problems with D3D freezing everytime I ran it but flashed the video card bios with a very stable Leadtek bios and it stopped the computer from every crashing. Alot of people here in these forums had a similar problem as me, and flashing the card fixed this. It was basically because the 2D and 3D speeds, by default, were different. 400/1100 and 425/1100. After flashing both are at 400/1100, if I overclock at all I get random freezes, and artifacts in games that usually run fine.

Now, NOT overclocking video card.

Using driver's 62.20, artifacts happen with 61.76 (official) and 62.01 as well.

Halo, FarCry and UT2004 all run perfectly.

Quake3, RTCW, Warcraft 3 all have artifacts, so do the 3 Nvidia Demos (Nalu, Clear Sailing and Timbury).

Painkiller runs perfectly (visually) but the game locks up and freezes my comp, but from the official Painkiller forums I can see this is a game bug not a video card bug.

I was going to disable Fastwrites, because I think I read somewhere it might fix this problem?

Any help would be hugely appreciated.

[Templar]

There just must be something else then clockrates that's causing these lockups.. One person is able to run a very similar rig with a bios totally stable out of the box while another one cant, and all at 400Mhz core.

Simon

[lowdog]

Sandman187 what bios did the card ship with? was it 5.40.02.10.14

Or was it 5.40.02.03.00

[Sandman187]

Sandman187 what bios did the card ship with? was it 5.40.02.10.14

Or was it 5.40.02.03.00

It was 5.40.02.10.14, at least this is what windows identified it as. When I turn the computer on, no message comes up at all about a video card. Where as with the leadtek bios, that always shows up before going to cmos/bios then windows.

[lowdog]

Ok Sandman187. I have a S-Media 6800U. I have had it for nearly 2 months now. I had the 5.40.02.03.00 bios which was fine except that fast writes was disabled.

I contacted S-Media and they sent me the 5.40.02.10.14 bios, I also got the Nvidia rev 2 bios 5.40.02.10.15 from a link in this forum "official 6800 bios" which has a link to a few bios. Here is the link to the bios:

http://membres.lycos.fr/headquaker/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=76


Anyway, I tried both of the above mentioned bios. The 5.40.02.10.14 that S-Media sent me has broblems with screen corruption and lock ups. The Nvidia rev 2 5.40.02.10.15 bios is just fine so far.

My advice is get rid of the 5.40.02.10.14 bios...even though it was faster in 3DM03 by 600 points than the Nvidia bios it seemed quite dodgy.

[csnake]

Lowdog, which bios flash program did you use to upgrade to 5.40.02.10.15?

[lowdog]

nvflash 442

A:\nvflash -2 -p -u -f 6800U2.ROM

6800U2.ROM is what I named the bios so it might be different in your case.

[alucard_x]

this is a shot in the dark, but try unplugging all unneccasry components in your computer, to give the card as much power as possible.. and see if it still happens.

could also underclock your card and see if its a problem with the actual performance of the card or heat related.

[Sandman187]

Have underclocked the card as low as 300/700 and the artifacts didn't go away

BUT, omFg I fixed the problem.

in rtcw and quake3 I turned OFF GL-Extensions, byebye artifact problems.

Only thing I need to do now, is either figure out how to remove artifacts in warcraft from some command line when I run the program. OR figure out how to turn ON extension limit in the forceware driver panel, as it won't let me turn it ON, its grayed out and set to OFF.

And as I already said, I have flashed the bios with Leadtek 5.40.02.15 which fixed the lockups (but not artifacts).