Oddball Graphics glitch on a 7800 GTX PCI-X

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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Ok this has me pretty confused, so I am hoping someone here could shed light on this for me.

Over the course of the last 2 months, lines have begun to appear on my secondary monitor. They are in groups of 4 short lines (maybe about 2" long each) and cause artifacts to appear on anything I drag over the area - for instance if I am web browsing, and drag the white part of the browser over it, it leaves it yellow).

Normally I would simply attribute this to the card being fried, but here is the odd thing: This only occurs on my secondary monitor. My primary monitor is fine. When I initially boot the computer, the BIOS screen and the bootup windows screen does not have the glitch. When I switch monitors from Primary to secondary, the secondary monitor still has the lines on it, no matter which physical monitor is secondary. I have tried using the VGA cable as well to verify it wasn't a cabling issue, same thing with that.

I have checked the temp on the card, it is well below the throttle threshold, and I dusted it off with some compressed air and reseated the card, same thing. My power output from the PSU appears fine.

I have tried several sets of drivers, thinking that maybe it was a driver issue, but they all have the same symptoms. Here's the weird part though - when I uninstall the drivers completely, reboot into regular VGA mode, the lines are gone! At this point though, the secondary monitor is in clone mode. I have tried several revisions of the Nvidia drivers, they all do the same thing.

In the past when I have seen artifacts on a card, it didn't have these symptoms. Anybody have an idea on this? P.S. I have not been able to try the card in another computer, as this is the only computer I have with a PCI express x16 slot, and I currently don't own any other PCI x16 cards (only AGP) to test it out with. I also do not have a floppy drive on this computer, so flashing the BIOS on the card would be difficult, although I can dig one up if need be. I cannot seem to find any BIOS online, however, for the geforce 7800GTX series.
 

Fraggable

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Jul 20, 2005
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Sounds like a bad patch of memory on the card. If you switch to only a single monitor and run some video card stress tests what happens?
 

Juddog

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Dec 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: Fraggable
Sounds like a bad patch of memory on the card. If you switch to only a single monitor and run some video card stress tests what happens?

I've run a stress test on the main monitor for hours with no glitches. If I shut down, disconnect the secondary monitor, and reboot, the lines appear on the single monitor. =(

If it's a bad batch of memory, am I pretty much screwed?
 

Fraggable

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Jul 20, 2005
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Yup pretty much. Replacing a memory chip is not really feasible, so if it's not under warranty then it's about done.
 

Juddog

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Dec 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: Fraggable
Yup pretty much. Replacing a memory chip is not really feasible, so if it's not under warranty then it's about done.

Nooo.... that sux. What are the chances that underclocking the video card will let it last a little longer?
 

Fraggable

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Jul 20, 2005
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Originally posted by: Juddog
Originally posted by: Fraggable
Yup pretty much. Replacing a memory chip is not really feasible, so if it's not under warranty then it's about done.

Nooo.... that sux. What are the chances that underclocking the video card will let it last a little longer?

Underclocking won't do much for you, if the memory is bad then anything stored in it will be corrupted.

Now if you were able to turn off that memory chip somehow, it might help. Like if there was a version of your card made with half the memory (7800GTX was only made with 512 and 256 AFAIK) and you were able to flash its BIOS to the version with less memory, it might help. I can't think of any other way to avoid using a memory chip.
 

Juddog

Diamond Member
Dec 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: Fraggable
Originally posted by: Juddog
Originally posted by: Fraggable
Yup pretty much. Replacing a memory chip is not really feasible, so if it's not under warranty then it's about done.

Nooo.... that sux. What are the chances that underclocking the video card will let it last a little longer?

Underclocking won't do much for you, if the memory is bad then anything stored in it will be corrupted.

Now if you were able to turn off that memory chip somehow, it might help. Like if there was a version of your card made with half the memory (7800GTX was only made with 512 and 256 AFAIK) and you were able to flash its BIOS to the version with less memory, it might help. I can't think of any other way to avoid using a memory chip.

Crap... that's the problem with video cards, can't replace the memory. If it was a PC I could just throw some new memory chips in there. :( Thanks for the advice, looks like I'll be on the market for a new video card soon.