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Black screen and loss of signal playing games

WT

WT

Diamond Member
I just picked up a GF4 4200 for my aged MSI 6119 MJ rig. Upon rebooting the PC, I lose the picture completely and must reboot. It did work in safe mode (albeit as a standard VGA adapter) but I decided to put my old GF2 Pro back in the PC til I could test the new card on another PC. Now my GF2 Pro is also going to a blank screen upon entering any game. I tried Q3, UT and BF1942. Quake 1 worked but this was in software mode, not in openGL. This had been a problem when I first put the GF2Pro card in until I set the AGP Aperture size from 128 all the way back to 4. I also learned that if my Samsung 955 monitor was set to optimal refresh rate, the same odd black screen would pop up from time to time. Turning it back to 72hz seemed to solve this. The game may run for 10-20 seconds, then the monitor blacks out and the power light blinks a slow green blink. I tried the GF4 4200 on a friends PC and it runs just fine. Thinking I was PS-starved, I tossed a 300 watt Antec power supply in the PC but it still gives out. This is using the older GF2 card which ran fine for a year+. When the game does die, I get a repeating sound if there was a sound currently playing when the game locks, but only IRQ 10 is shared between the SB Live! and the NIC. The video card has IRQ 11 all to itself. Oddly enough, the machine does appear to be OK with this loss of signal, as I can access shared drives on the PC from another PC, so it isn't locked tighter than the proverbial bull's rump. I'm using the same video drivers that always worked before. Could it be that the newer Nvidia drivers were not removed from the GF4 card ? I have this NView crap that pops up when I load drivers for the old card, and I recognized that this component DID come with the new cards drivers but are not a part of the GF2 driver set. I tried loading Win98 over top of itself, then reinstalling DX8.1 today but that did nothing. It did tank on me when it was loading DX8.1, but running the Dxdiag utility I don't see any problem devices. I'd load W2K if I thought it would fix my problems but I hate to blow away a perfect Win98 system just because of a borked video driver subsystem. Oh, I did install and run Detonator Destroyer to make sure I was cleaning out extra driver stuff but I'm unsure whether that did anything beneficial.

Sorry for the long post, but I do this for a living and know that the more info, the less you need to guess ...
:|
 
Further testing involved lowering the Hardware Acceleration two notches to Basic Hardware functions (located under the Performace Tab) and things worked fne, but looked like hell. Any suggestions ? I tried to reload DX8.1b but after a reboot, the screen blanks out again before it finishes updating the files.
 
deffinately have to say it is the mother boards fault. your motherboard may not be able to supply the ti4200 with enough power and when you go to use all of it in a game it fscks up! I did this to a friends computer but it happended really weirdly!!!!!



i installed a new sc that didnt work in his comp but worked in all others, then his gpu died but only in his computer, then his older gpu no longer worked in his comp but all others. then the only gpu that worked was my old one!! yeah it confused the hell outta me and 3 others!!
 
The really odd thing is, everything did work before the card swap, and I had a very occasional lockup, maybe once a week at the most, but I attribute that more to a very hot PC running in a room with no ventilation to speak of. I found a nice Abit KG7Raid board for $58 so I may just try and piece together another PC to put the GF4 in. I can't see hanging onto this P3 1.1 as my main PC for too much longer. It will be moved to spare PC status at that point.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is a complete and fresh reinstall of Win98 (since I'd hate to lose everthing - emails, game settings, mp3's). I did that one time before and spent a week getting back up and going again. The saga continues ...
 
Agreed ... I actually run 4 partitions on each PC ...

C: - Windows
D: - Games
E: - Music
F: - Downloads

Each PC has the same named partitions so its very easy to keep track of everything. I'm OK with that but I still can't just recreate the program groups, since Windows will no longer have registry entries for each program. For whatever reason, Dungeon Siege and BF1942 are at least playable now. DS runs fine but BF1942 sends me to a black screen at the exit of the game, when it should be returning to the desktop. I'm working on reinstalling BF1942 and UT and see if that might fix it.
 
To put some finality to this problem, I swapped out my old GF1 into my main rig and it solved the problems, but its no longer fun playing BF1942 :-( I put the GF2Pro into the spare PC for now .. it doesn't run in that PC either, at least in games, and shelved the GF4 until my new MoBo that I just ordered gets here.

The GF2 Pro was a good card that I picked up from Newegg as a refurb but it appears to have "popped a gasket" at this point.
 
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