So, none of my games work...

[JetBlack69]

I've been at school for most of the summer and I come home to find that none of my games work. The ones I've tried are:
Quake III Arena
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
CounterStrike
Soldier of Fortune II

My computer specs are:
PIV 1.6 running at 2.24 (140 fsb) I've had it at 150 fsb, but then summer came and it would overheat.
GeForce4 4200 64MB no overclocking
Abit BD7-Raid mobo
Sound Blaster Audigy

The problem is that when I start a game, the menu loads but then it freezes and the sound loops. I'll probably last in the menu for no more than a few seconds and it freezes. This also happens when I play a DVD, it will start, but no more than a few seconds later, the system freezes with a looping sound. Also, I don't believe it is a CPU issue because I run distributed folding which leaves my CPU at 100% load for over a week.

I've tried the latest drivers from Nvidia and from creative. I have all the updates from Windows XP Pro. I'm running Dx9b. I'm thinking it might my video card fan, but I would think that my video card would overheat after playing for a few minutes, not seconds.

Thanks.

 

[igowerf]

Is the AGP bus overclocked too? Why don't you just try clocking back down to 1.6ghz?

 

[Shagga]

Could also be your sound card. Take it out and then run the games.

Is the fan spinning? if it ain't then your barking up the right tree I would have thought.

 

[JetBlack69]

The fan is spinning. I'll clock it back down to 1.6 and see what happens. I'll also try unplugging the sound card.

 

[mooncancook]

Note that modern chips such as CPU and GPU accumulate massive heat in seconds not minutes. so make sure your graphic card fan is working properly too.

 

[JetBlack69]

Well, I tried some different, older drivers, but I could only boot into safe mode. I took out the card and noticed some brown marks on a chip, not the main chip or anything, but a chip in the upper left hand corner of the card. I guess you could say they are burn marks, but I'm not sure. Looks like a dead card to me. However, it's been working fine when I don't install the nvidia drivers and use the default VGA drivers.

 

[JetBlack69]

Here is a picture of the same card I have

http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/pny/gf4_ti4200/main_shot.jpg

Notice the black square chip next to the blue inductor, there are two black chips. My lower black chip has some brown stuff around it. Anyone know what that could be?

 

[LiLithTecH]

The brown stuff you are refering to is the
Protective Coating for the circuit board that
is applied after the components have been
wave soldered to the board.

 

[JetBlack69]

Interesting info about the brown stuff.

I formated and reinstalled windows XP. When I updated the driver, I was having the same issues. I just went to best buy and bought another card and everything is working fine now.

Is there any way to test to see if my videocard is truely broken?

 

[alm4rr]

was anyone else using it? was it left plugged in all the time you were away?

 

[JetBlack69]

My sister's boyfriend was using it, but he said he didn't use it the past 2 weeks. Atleast he didn't play any games in those 2 weeks. I thought it was odd that my DVD froze as well as the games. I'm keeping the geforce 4 card and I'm going to install it in a spare computer in a few days.

 

[alm4rr]

I'm sure he was doin other stuff on ur comp - maybe installing stuff he shouldn't have been, or usin IE where stuff installed itself.