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Unbelievable Video Card Headaches

S

Scotty25

Junior Member
Ok this will be a slightly long post, but it is necessary to give some background information on what is going on.

Old System
Radeon 9800 Pro
Athlon XP 1900+
768 MB of DDR266(PC2100) RAM ? Generic
Raid Max 420W power supply
3 Hard Drives
2 DVD-ROM/RW drives
Creative Soundblaster Live! Platinum 5.1

OK so there?s my old system. What was happening was in newer games such as Half-Life2, Doom3, EQII, Planetside, and even Battlefield, I would get booted back to the desktop after like 10-20 minutes of play.

Resolutions:
-For Heat I took a big turbo fan and let it blow into my case, didn?t work.
-For too much power, I removed every single component that wasn?t needed and just ran the bare essentials.
-I reformatted my drive, and only installed DX9, a couple of games, motherboard drivers, video card drivers and then ran the game. No go there either.
-I tried rolling back drivers to previous catalyst drivers, the latest ones, I tried using Omega Drivers etc?
-I also tried underclocking my video card to no avail.
-Plugged a Nvidia Ti4200 card into my system and it worked fine, no problems although obviously slower.
-I thought my hard drives were making whining/scratching noises, but it turns out that was coming from my power supply.

Finally I got fed up and just started buying new hardware. Because I thought it was my video card, I bought a new one. When that didn?t work, I figured it had to be my motherboard and the AGP bus, when that didn?t work, I bought some new memory etc.. etc?

Low and behold here is my new system

New System
BFG Geforce 6800 OC
Foxconn AMD64 motherboard
AMD64 2800+ CPU
768 MB of DDR266(PC2100) RAM (bought new sticks)
Same hard drives just removed one (total 2)
New 300W power supply
2 DVD-ROM/RW drives
Onboard Lan and Onboard Sound

Ok now, with my new card here is the problem I?m getting. I get really really weird polygons in some games that I load up (I?m talking big humoungous bright red or green polygons that take up a 1/4th of the page). Then I get strange artifacts in weird colors as well. Sometimes the game will lock up for just a split second and then keep going with the weird colors, sometimes it will lock up completely, other times it will lockup but I can still hear all the noises going on in the background.

Resolutions:
-I put in a new power supply as my old one was making funky noises.
-I?m using some new memory sticks
-I?ve installed games to two different hard drives
-I?ve put in brand new IDE cables
-Disabled Fast Writes, tried changing AGP aperature sizes
-Disabled onboard audio, onboard LAN etc?
-I?ve tried underclocking my video card (because with the BFG the core is clocked 25Mhz to the 6800GT, so I brought it back down to 325 which is what the 6800 is supposed to be at).
-I?ve tried removing all power sources except what is necessary
-I?ve tried the newest detonator drivers, and the ones that came with my card.

I?ve tried tons of stuff and I am completely, completely stuck here. I?m an IT professional so I at least have an inkling on what is going on, but I am most perplexed with this problem. If anyone can help me, I will forever be in your debt. Thanks in advance for so much help. Ask me any questions and I?ll respond ASAP.
 
Have you tried running some basic system stability tests like memtest86 and prime95? You gotta walk before you can crawl (or something like that...)

Also, Foxconn motherboards are generally pretty bad, and I'm guessing you bought another no-name power supply (since you didn't mention a name).
 
Ok, I will try those tests on it to see what happens, thanks for the suggestion.

Yeah, I don't have an endless supply of money hats at the moment so I can't afford to go around buying a ton of parts and trying them out, but I've never had such an issue before that is so troublesome to figure out what is going on. I guess it's possible it's a bad video card, even though it's only a week old.

I will also check on the amps for the +12V pipe and I'll check the brand.

Anyone else have any troubleshooting steps I can perform?
 
Hopefuly you didn't replace a generic 420w psu, with a generic 300w psu. Generic PSU's cause lots of headaches and problems just like the ones you are experiencing. It is also possible that your new video card could be bad, or a heat issue could also cause similar problems.

Also, it's probably not a good idea to be using pc2100 ddr with an A64, it's more than likely being overclocked, and that could also be causing your problems..
 
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