Corrupt video - vertical lines

[sipuncher]

First off sorry for the cross post... but as you will see everyone has been stumped in Technical Support and suggest I try here.

Comuter Spec:

Gigabyte GA-8KNXP motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 "prescott" 3.2ghz
1.5gb Crucial DDR 333mhz RAM
GeForce4 Ti4400 Graphics card
Enermax 350w PSU

Original post

To summarise I've got vertical lines start to appear from the point of the xp splash screen loading, and when I get into windows the screen is hardly readable for these lines and corrupt video image. I thought the problem was my geforce 4 as everything was fine using an old tnt2 ultra, so purchased a gefore 6600 but the problem was back with that.

Nothing is overclocked, memtest shows my ram to be fine, ive not added anything else to my machine to mean the psu isnt delivering enough current all of a sudden and the problem only exists in windows, not the bios and not linux. Trying to install a new graphics driver crashes the machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[rbV5]

Generally graphic corruption is caused by heat or Power.

It seems too fast to be heat, so first, I suspect power supply, but it may just be driver issues.

Try removing all non-essential components, and all but a single stick of ram. Look for driver cleaner pro and remove your video card drivers completely in safe mode. I guess you'll have to re-enable the agp440 driver. When in windows try to reinstall the MB drivers, particularly the AGP driver. After reinstalling the chipset drivers, try reinstalling the graphics driver (you may want to download the latest set even if you have them already incase your package is corrupt.

 

[sipuncher]

Having fiddled around for ages in and out of safe mode and windows recovery console i backed up the few bits on my windows partition using a knoppix cd and did a clean install.

All was well with the graphics until windows went to load for the first time after completing the install where the corruption and lines reappeared. Why could this be?!

It now cannot be a software problem so on the hardware side:

* I've run memtest which found no errors with my ram
* Nothing is overclocked and the case is well ventilated so it cannot be heat
* The same problem occurs on two different graphics cards (although strangely not a third older tnt2 ultra)

Surely it cannot be my psu either from the way the corruption always occurs on the windows splash screen?

I really have no clue what is going on or a solution as to how to rectify this!

 

[pkme2]

Check your video card. My video did that in my graphics machine, until it was replaced.

 

[sipuncher]

Check your video card. My video did that in my graphics machine, until it was replaced.

The problem occurs on both my GeForce 6600 and Geforce 4400 graphics cards, the 6600 being brand new so I doubt that both cards could be faulty and displaying exactly the same fault?

 

[sipuncher]

bump

 

[Panther505]

Good chance that the problem may be the AGP connector on the board. Ensure that you seat the card well and verify that everything is seated correctly. But by the sounds of it, I would guess that the AGP slot maybe on it's way out. The reason that you didn't have trouble before is that the TNT most likely pulls less power from the AGP then does the other two cards.

Also most likely you don't have the problem in linux is that you are probably not running the 3D driver. If you do not have the nvidia driver installed then you are not pulling the most power that you can from the card, and thus it may function properly.


Panther505

 

[sipuncher]

Yeah, that does sound quite plausible. I don't think in linux I was running the nvidia driver anymore as it reverted back to the default when I got my new monitor and connected using DVI.

I don't get why the AGP connector would suddenly have a problem though... I've had nothing but trouble with that motherboard, sent it back once because it wouldn't boot which turned out to be the CPU socket, and the fault happened again and when I got it back I found this problem.

Could the problem by the PSU for the same reasoning? Although again, that seems a little co-incidental to happen at the same time.

As a bit of further information, when I found my geforce 4 didnt work I put the TNT2 in and was using the computer fine for a couple of weeks (thinking it was the graphics card at fault whilst waiting for my new card to arrive) but graphic intensive stuff in windows was very slow, and videos would hardly play at all in media player. I suspected it was just using a very old card, but could it be another symptom of the AGP slot?