Troubleshooting a GF3 Video Card

[JoshGuru7]

After performing faithfully for nearly the entire school year, the computer I built my sister is suddenly experiencing repeated NV4_disp infinite loop BSODs. She hadn't fiddled with the video drivers which causes me to suspect a video card failure, but I tried various detonator drivers anyway. None of these solve the NV4_disp problem and the only way that the system will successfully operate is once I completely uninstall all of the Nvidia drivers and then use a driver clean program to kill the remnants. Under this scenario with the standard vga adapter (VGAsafe) the computer operates perfectly and doesn't experience the NV4_disp loop.

I've swapped out the memory already with no change, but I don't have another system handy to test the video card in. A visual inspection of the card and the fact that it runs correctly in standard VGA leads me to suspect it might be a problem with the motherboard bios or possibly a power problem.

My sister's comp specs are:

3200+ Athlon 64 processor
MSI MS-7030 @ 200Mhz bus w/ 6.00 PG Bios (7/28/2004)
GeForce3
Windows XP SP2 (legit copy)
Kingston 512MB PC133 (2x 256MB)
WD WD800JB 80 Gig Hard Drive
DURO 400W PSU

Does anybody have any recommendations how I could narrow down the problem? Is there a program that would let me isolate control of the advanced features on the card to see what is causing the crash when I try to run a det driver on it?

Edit: I should mention that this MSI motherboard has MSI Live Update program and so it does seem remotely possible that the software could have updated her bios or vga bios automatically or through a prompt that she agreed to without knowing the repercussions. I've tried flashing to an earlier bios (my best guess of what it originally had) but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks in advance!

 

[ddogg]

well since u dont have another system to test the card it would be difficult to really check whether the video card is giving problems...do u by chance have another card that u can put into this system? this could either be a motherboard of vga problem!!

 

[JoshGuru7]

I have an old 8MB PCI card which I installed and runs the system fine with no crashes. However, I don't know whether this is because the other card is faulty, or whether this is because this very old card doesn't use any of the advanced features/power drain which cause the other configuration to crash.