• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Hardware incompatibility, defective, or software?

billsbury

Member
Hey guys and gals, if you have a minute sometime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I just spent $1160 on a new system and it's doing some weird stuff, it feels like a slightly defective video card. Here's what it does.

First off, I tried nVidia's demos to see what this new video card can do. They run horribly. It's all skippy and slow and losing a million frames. Nvidia's own demos run horribly with the card for which they are meant. This doesn't feel quite right.

My right monitor flickers whenever my machine is loading windows and when I do certain things (like deleting files). The monitor didn't flicker with my old video card ever.

And I don't know if any of you are gamers out there, but my old machine ran flawless in Warcraft III with my old All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro and this new card GeForce 7800 GT acts like it can barely keep up with very very little load on it. It lags something awful.

It does a couple other things but those could just be Windows I suppose.

My specs are as follows and are all brand new:

AMD 64 3800+ X2 Dual Core
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Kingston 1 GB PC3200 dual-channel
Western Digital 250 GB SATA II hard drive
eVGA GeForce 7800 GT video card
Antec TruePower 2.0 550W power supply

Does anyone else think that it's a defective video card?

Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. I'm really in a spot here.
-Bill from Indiana
 
Is the 6 pin PCIe connector plugged into the video card??? <-Sometimes we forget the simplest things...

Latest drivers??
 
All the stuff in the OP shouldn't be happening. I have 2 7800GT's myself (in SLI 😛) and they run Warcraft just fine.

Try Beta drivers?? (82.12's?) just make sure to uninstall the old ones first.
 
Yea I don't know what it is. I've got the newest drivers and it just randomly flickers and looks crappy. Is it possible it's getting a pad 6-pin from the power supply?
 
Something's wrong there; that system should run like a champ. Try running 3DMark05 and see if you get a 'normal' score for a system with your specs.

If that doesn't work, I'd reseat and recheck the power connection on the video card, and wipe/reinstall all the drivers (motherboard/chipset, DirectX, then video card).
 
Well I bought the 3dmark software and ran it. As expected, it ran horribly for part of the test. I literally got 1-2 frames per second in some parts.
Here were some of the results:

GT1 - Return To Proxycon 31.5 FPS Game Tests
GT2 - Firefly Forest 21.5 FPS Game Tests
GT3 - Canyon Flight 35.5 FPS Game Tests
CPU Score 5069 CPUMarks CPU Tests
CPU Test 1 2.3 FPS CPU Tests
CPU Test 2 4.9 FPS CPU Tests

It said final score was 7219, whatever that means.

And I didn't get any sound during the test, if I was supposed to.
 
Originally posted by: billsbury
Well I bought the 3dmark software and ran it. As expected, it ran horribly for part of the test. I literally got 1-2 frames per second in some parts.
Here were some of the results:

GT1 - Return To Proxycon 31.5 FPS Game Tests
GT2 - Firefly Forest 21.5 FPS Game Tests
GT3 - Canyon Flight 35.5 FPS Game Tests
CPU Score 5069 CPUMarks CPU Tests
CPU Test 1 2.3 FPS CPU Tests
CPU Test 2 4.9 FPS CPU Tests

It said final score was 7219, whatever that means.

And I didn't get any sound during the test, if I was supposed to.

You don't need to buy it (yes, the website makes it look like you do, but you can download the free version and just run it). 😛 The paid version adds some automation features and extra testing capabilities that the 'basic' one doesn't have, but the scores are the same.

That score is about correct for your setup, so it appears your hardware is working more or less correctly. The parts getting "1-2 FPS" are rendering through the CPU, not the graphics card (I wish they'd put some sort of disclaimer on this, because people keep showing up saying "OMG whats wrong I only get like 2FPS in 3DMark!!!1!"). And no, there's no sound.

Unfortunately, that doesn't explain your issues. 🙁

I would still try wiping and reinstalling the motherboard/chipset drivers, DirectX, and the graphics card drivers. That has cleared up some weird video performance issues for me in the past. Beyond that... maybe you have some sort of virus or spyware that's eating up system resources and making things run slowly?
 
Back
Top