Weird video glitch

[tcsenter]

I bought my sister a Gigabyte Maya Radeon 7500 Pro AGP card for Christmas. When I installed it in her computer, the display was garbled at POST and persisted that way to the Windows desktop. Her mainboard is an older VIA 693 based AGP 2x mainboard, so I tried the card in our computer, which had a new MSI KM133A mainboard. Same thing, garbled and distorted at POST.

So I RMA'd the card back to FTI Computer in New York, who sent the card back here to Gigabyte in California. 60 days later (!!), I finally get the replacement card today.

By this time, we have a new mainboard, a Biostar KM266 M7VIG. Put the replacement card in the AGP slot, which has been using an ATI Rage128 Pro AGP 4x card just fine. Power the computer on - SAME THING! Garbled, unreadable, display at POST. I let it boot to the Windows desktop, no change.

So I'm pissed, thinking they didn't even give me a new card, not to mention that I sent them the retail box back in pristine condition, you couldn't tell it had been opened, and they sent back a retail box that looked like someone had jumped up and down on it a dozen times.

I gave the system a three finger salute to reboot, and the display upon reboot was fine - no display corruption. Installed the ATI drivers, restart, all seems well. Performed a little testing with Final Reality, went online for a while, all seems good.

I shutdown the computer before going to the store. Come back, cold boot the computer, garbled display is back. Reset the computer, garbled display is gone. I looked for a VGA BIOS update but I have the latest one.

I am using an Enhance 300watt AMD/P4 certified power supply with minimal load: no audio enabled, one HDD, one CD-RW, one PCI modem, 512MB PC133 SDRAM, 850MHz DURON not overclocked. I haven't tried it in my sister's computer, yet.

Sound familiar to anyone? Was wondering how to proceed next.

 

[selfbuilt]

I'm not clear .... does the garbling continue once the desktop loads? If it doesn't (and it's only during boot-up), then I have a similar issue with my Radeon 9500 Pro. I've seen other comments about this problem with my card and boards with VIA chipsets. Apparently, it's not an uncommon problem ... but the general consensus (and my own experience) tells me it makes absolutely no difference to stability or performance. I've had my 9500 Pro for over 3 months now, and its been perfectly stable and reliable during that time.

As you mention, the "garbling" is variable, both in terms of how often it shows up and how severe it is. But it's never affected system performance, as it has always been limited to the background system screen as windows load (I notice, however, that it doesn't seem to affect the actual post boot-up sequence, but only starts after the windows loading begins). It's always gone by the time the desktop loads.

I've seen reports that turning off fast writes and disabling 8X AGP could solve the problem (it didn't for me . Hopefully it won't cause you any further problems ... but it's odd that ATI doesn't seem to know what to make of it.

 

[tcsenter]

Power the computer on - SAME THING! Garbled, unreadable, display at POST. I let it boot to the Windows desktop, no change.