I bought a 6800 GT card last weekend and it had been working fine but I had a weird problem occur yesterday. While a game was loading up, the image suddenly became a completely garbled mess, like a frame of TV static but colorful, and the computer froze. When I rebooted it, it seemed to get into windows fine but when I opened up any program (even something like a file manager), the same effect occurred again. After doing this a couple of times and finding that there were no such problems in the BIOS or in safe mode, I uninstalled and reinstalled the 61.77 drivers but the issue was still there. I sometimes got only a partly messed up picture that was recognizable but had random lines and pixels over it; sometimes it also froze but not always. At one point I got a BSOD saying that windows has been shut down to prevent damage to hardware followed by a bunch of other stuff that was mostly unreadable, and another time the monitor kept doing the resolution changing effect (going black and clicking) every few seconds.
The gpu temperature was reported as 63C idle (the display and nvidia control panels seemed to work okay) so that looked fine. The voltage ratings seemed acceptable at 12v at 12.22v and 5v at 4.86v; not great but no variation and the same as they had been all week. I called BFG's tech support who advised me to change the AGP voltage to 1.6V and turn off fast writes, but that didn't do anything. While I was talking to them I was messing around with the windows resolutions and found that there were no problems in 800x600 or 1024x768 but anything higher gave screen artifacts (although not the total junk I was getting earlier). The artifacts suddenly stopped occuring at some point while I was doing this and everything inexplicably became normal. I loaded up UT2004 and everything looked good, but after about ten minutes I got the sudden lockup with the static covered screen again. I restarted it again and everything has since been working fine in both windows and games, but I still have no idea what happened and what to do if the problem returns. Have any of you had such problems?
This is all at BFG's stock GT speeds by the way. My PSU is kind of borderline for this card - a 400w that can crank out only 15A at 12V - but it was working fine for five days after I disconnected a few things, and the problems were occurring in normal 2D mode anyway.
The gpu temperature was reported as 63C idle (the display and nvidia control panels seemed to work okay) so that looked fine. The voltage ratings seemed acceptable at 12v at 12.22v and 5v at 4.86v; not great but no variation and the same as they had been all week. I called BFG's tech support who advised me to change the AGP voltage to 1.6V and turn off fast writes, but that didn't do anything. While I was talking to them I was messing around with the windows resolutions and found that there were no problems in 800x600 or 1024x768 but anything higher gave screen artifacts (although not the total junk I was getting earlier). The artifacts suddenly stopped occuring at some point while I was doing this and everything inexplicably became normal. I loaded up UT2004 and everything looked good, but after about ten minutes I got the sudden lockup with the static covered screen again. I restarted it again and everything has since been working fine in both windows and games, but I still have no idea what happened and what to do if the problem returns. Have any of you had such problems?
This is all at BFG's stock GT speeds by the way. My PSU is kind of borderline for this card - a 400w that can crank out only 15A at 12V - but it was working fine for five days after I disconnected a few things, and the problems were occurring in normal 2D mode anyway.
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