XFX GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB DDR3 DUAL DVI HDCP XXX

[kevinfishburne]

Has anyone had any luck getting this card to work in any Linux distro? I recently purchased it and the latest nVidia binary drivers fail. The nv driver works but without DRI. lspci describes the device as "nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0400 (rev a1)" and I'm using Ubuntu 7.04. Thanks all.

Kevin

[zander]

Please see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46678 and http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72490.

[kevinfishburne]

Thanks so much. I'll try to hack my way through those guidelines and hopefully I can get it working.

[kevinfishburne]

I read and followed the relevant instructions at posts here:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46678
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=58498
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72490

I've used the latest version of Envy to both automatically and manually install the nVidia driver. I've put Ubuntu in runlevel 3 as suggested by the nVidia installer, stopped x with the '/etc/init.d/gdm stop' command, and run the installer. It said it was missing the directory '/var/lib/nvidia' during the install but finished anyway, so I created the directory for it and reran the installation. This time it had no errors and I rebooted.

After all this the problem remains. When loading x the screen goes black, blips for a second, and finally stops responding (caps and num lock fail to toggle). I don't have SSH set up so I havent tried getting into it remotely to run the nVidia bug report tool, but ran it after I restored xorg.conf to the nv driver instead. Pressing the power button to initiate a shutdown does nothing and there is no HDD activity so it appears the system's fairly locked-up.

My PC is physically clean, the BIOS is at the latest version and hasn't been updated in a while so should be stable, and I've checked that my video card's BIOS is at the same version posted by someone on www.mvktech.net. I reflashed it with that image to be safe and there is no change. I also reset my BIOS to the default values and there are no temperature problems. Strangely the card works fine with the nv driver. Something else strange is that the card has a six pin power connector with an adapter cable that requires two power connections from my PSU. However the card appears to work without warning even if one, both, or none of the power cables from the PSU are connected to the card. My ATI Radeon X1800 XT used to scream at boot if I didn't connect external power to it.

Attached are the bug report after restoring xorg.conf to use the nv driver, the bad xorg.conf file, the good xorg.conf file with the nv driver, and two xorg log files. bad.Xorg.0.log shows what happens up to the point where the system freezes. A previous version of it had some odd ACPI errors but this one doesn't. good.Xorg.0.log is from the subsequent good boot with the nv driver for comparison.

Any ideas are appreciated, and ebay doesn't count, haha.

Kevin

[kevinfishburne]

I thought I'd deleted it but here's the xorg log file from the previous failure, when I was using Envy to automatically install the nVidia binary driver. It contains the ACPI errors near the end of the file before the PC freezes. My latest attempt described by the log files in the previous post was using the nVidia installer.

[kevinfishburne]

FYI:

I swapped out hdd's and installed Windows XP Pro, installed all "critical" updates, the latest nVidia driver from their site, Far Cry, Oblivion, and patched both games with the most recent update. Both games after about five minutes of play briefly froze and appeared to swap large blocks of vram. This happened several more times until the game froze completely, after which Windows reported the NV driver had an error. I rebooted and was able to recreate the problem. I know my RAM, BIOS, and PCIe slot are fine, so it looks like some asshole on ebay tried to pull a fast one on me. I'm speaking to XFX customer support about their warranty/RMA policy so hopefully they'll take care of it.

Thanks all.

Kevin

[mooninite]

I've gone through two XFX cards in the past 6 months from artifacts.

Their RMA process is wonderful, but I'm tired of sending cards through it every 3 months.

I would look for another distributor for your next purchase.