- Oct 9, 2002
- 28,298
- 1,235
- 136
[edit]
Even though the vid card is messed up, it's not the cause of the infrequent reboots. Looks like I've got a few more days of troubleshooting to do...
[/edit]
PICTURE
Look at the picture. Would you suspect a faulty pixel pipeline? Vertex shader? Bad video memory? Hot GPU? The screenshot comes from an AGP GeForce FX 5200 and the problem follows the card when moved into a different computer.
I've been troubleshooting this machine for a customer for the last 2 days. It has been suffering random lock-ups and reboots while using Windows and Microsoft Office. I've already ruled out the memory, CPU, cooling, power supply, and IDE devices. I've updated the BIOS, Intel chipset/INF driver, video driver, cleared CMOS, etc. It still restarts and/or locks up occasionally. Sometimes it will seem like the problem has gone away for several hours of constant use, then it will come back unexpectedly and get stuck in an endless restarting loop again.
Finally, Windows was aware of a long string of crashes and submitted a few error reports after it stopped restarting. They all identified the video driver "stuck in a loop" and suggested downloading the latest version (I had already installed the latest from NVIDIA's site). I downloaded a few NVIDIA demos and they all looked fine except for the Ogre demo. When the Ogre is walking backward (the first few seconds of the demo), it's backside is a flickering, distorted, jumble of polygons. It then clears up and looks fine until the demo starts over again. I pulled the card out and put it in my system and I get the same results. I put a GeForce 6800 in his system and there was no problem.
I noticed that there were some annoying "MSI" tabs in Display Properties (the main dialog, not "Advanced" where the NVIDIA tabs should be). They kept coming back even when I removed all MSI and NVIDIA software, uninstalled the display adapter, restarted, and reinstalled the latest drivers from NVIDIA. I found instructions online to delete msicpl.* files and it worked like a charm. I uninstalled/reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers one more time just to make sure that they had not been modified by MSI's bullsh!t, but the 3D glitch remains.
MSI GeForce FX 5200
Motherboard - MSI (some board with flashy multi-colored lights on the north bridge HSF, integrated LAN, no integrated video)
Sound - Integrated (C-Media)
Memory - 1GB (2x512)
CPU - P4 2.8 GHz
Even though the vid card is messed up, it's not the cause of the infrequent reboots. Looks like I've got a few more days of troubleshooting to do...
[/edit]
PICTURE
Look at the picture. Would you suspect a faulty pixel pipeline? Vertex shader? Bad video memory? Hot GPU? The screenshot comes from an AGP GeForce FX 5200 and the problem follows the card when moved into a different computer.
I've been troubleshooting this machine for a customer for the last 2 days. It has been suffering random lock-ups and reboots while using Windows and Microsoft Office. I've already ruled out the memory, CPU, cooling, power supply, and IDE devices. I've updated the BIOS, Intel chipset/INF driver, video driver, cleared CMOS, etc. It still restarts and/or locks up occasionally. Sometimes it will seem like the problem has gone away for several hours of constant use, then it will come back unexpectedly and get stuck in an endless restarting loop again.
Finally, Windows was aware of a long string of crashes and submitted a few error reports after it stopped restarting. They all identified the video driver "stuck in a loop" and suggested downloading the latest version (I had already installed the latest from NVIDIA's site). I downloaded a few NVIDIA demos and they all looked fine except for the Ogre demo. When the Ogre is walking backward (the first few seconds of the demo), it's backside is a flickering, distorted, jumble of polygons. It then clears up and looks fine until the demo starts over again. I pulled the card out and put it in my system and I get the same results. I put a GeForce 6800 in his system and there was no problem.
I noticed that there were some annoying "MSI" tabs in Display Properties (the main dialog, not "Advanced" where the NVIDIA tabs should be). They kept coming back even when I removed all MSI and NVIDIA software, uninstalled the display adapter, restarted, and reinstalled the latest drivers from NVIDIA. I found instructions online to delete msicpl.* files and it worked like a charm. I uninstalled/reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers one more time just to make sure that they had not been modified by MSI's bullsh!t, but the 3D glitch remains.
MSI GeForce FX 5200
Motherboard - MSI (some board with flashy multi-colored lights on the north bridge HSF, integrated LAN, no integrated video)
Sound - Integrated (C-Media)
Memory - 1GB (2x512)
CPU - P4 2.8 GHz
Facebook
Twitter