Graphics card problems

Sokar Rostau · 01-03-2008, 03:22 AM

I've been having problems with my PC for around 8 months now. Actually, it's not the PC(s), but the graphics cards that have been having problems.

My first PC (I had only used Macs before), a 700Mhz PIII, had a nVidia GeForce FX5200 AGP video card in it. It worked perfectly from the time I got it, in about July/August last year, until about April when it started having problems in NWN. When I first got it this PC had a 4Gb and a 10Gb HDD and I purchased a 40Gb one on eBay.

The problem started in the level 3 quest area of the server I played on. The area was a sewer and was almost completely dark. At first I was able to get to the Boss before the monitor just switched off. I had to reboot the PC to fix it. That only happened once or twice. Then it started happening as soon as I entered the area - every time I entered the area. But I could play with my high level character in every other area I had access to (I actually never bothered trying to take that character into the sewers). After a few weeks it started happening to my high level character too only this time it was in two particular areas and one exact spot. The first area had a lot of lava in it and the second had a red mist. It got to the point where I would tell my party members to wait for me because I knew that I would have to reboot my PC when I got to the end of the red mist area, while it could happen anywhere in that area it happened 9/10 times at that door.

This went on for a while and I tried replacing drivers etc. but nothing worked. I thought maybe it was just that particular server using areas with lots of one colour or something... until it started happening first in "normal" areas on that server and then on other servers as well. It got worse soon after with the monitor switching off while viewing text-only PDFs and then sometimes while simply browsing the web with Firefox. By then I was starting to look for a new GFX card because I thought it was screwed. In the interim my friend gave me an old 8mb GFX card which had no issues at all.

Being a poverty stricken student I tried to find a bargain on eBay for months and always lost the best auctions in the closing 5 seconds. Things like FX5200s for $10 there's always 20 people bidding in the last 30 seconds. It took me so long to find a new GFX card that when the opportunity to buy a new PC came up in August at uni I grabbed it. $100 bought me a 2.4ghz Intel P4 with an 80Gb HDD, monitor and webcam... a huge improvement over my old P3. It has an onboard 64mb GFX chip so I have been using that to play NWN and Medieval Total War for the last few months. As expected, the FX5200 didn't work in the P4 either, so I still needed to find a new GFX card.

A few days before xmas another friend of mine told me he had an FX5700 GFX card that I could have for $50. Another friend told him that I had ****ty RAM (only 512mb) so he offered me his 1Gb RAM for another $50... then he said I may as well buy his whole system for $200 because he was about to buy a new one anyway. So now I have an Athlon 64, but because he isn't finished removing all his data from the HDD it isn't running just yet... and now I'm worried it's not going to run at all.

Excited that I would finally have a GFX card I installed it on the P4 and played NWN and Medieval for a few hours before going to the shops and buying Medieval 2 because it was on special for xmas. I played M2TW for 3 or 4 days (and it worked flawlessly on medium settings) when, it seems, the GFX card problems started again. I had put my computer to sleep, as usual and when I woke it up in the morning it was fine for about an hour and then I launched NWN and it hung. Okay, **** happens, I used Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut NWN down, went back to the desktop and noticed that the colours on my desktop were a bit off (it looked sort of like 256k instead of 1 million colours). I figured it mustn't have corrected itself after NWN so I rebooted.

I had only launched NWN because I wanted to check something for the forums so instead of starting NWN again I went back to there. It took less than a minute for my screen to go from vibrant colours to that weird 256kish looking thing again, only this time things were worse. Whenever I clicked on something the screen went blank for a second. Click on My Computer, screen goes black and when it comes back the My Computer panel is open. Click on Control Panel, screen goes black for a second and then when it comes back on the Control Panel is there. The only time the monitor didn't go blank when I clicked on something it didn't actually change on screen... until it went blank again and would come back with all the windows I had tried to open before all open at once.

So... I thought maybe something had gone wrong when I rebooted so I rebooted again and this time nothing happened. The monitor simply wouldn't switch on. I tried again with the same result, the monitor just showed the orange stand-by light. I plugged the monitor into the onboard graphics and same thing, nothing happened. I unplugged the GFX card and then it worked perfectly. I have since managed to get a picture on the monitor twice with the FX5700 plugged in - the BIOS screen once and to desktop once with the same degraded colours and flashing screen.

I put the GFX card into the Athlon along with my 40Gb HDD (It has had an empty 10Gb partition for the OS for months). At first nothing happened, but I don't know much about PCs so I fiddled with some cables and finally I got to the the AMD Athlon screen and then to the start-up screen (the one where you press Del to enter BIOS). Only problem was that the keyboard wasn't cooperating with the PC (something that had happened a few times with the P4 and FX5200). So I had to reboot, making sure the keyboard was plugged in properly, this time the same thing - I got as far as the start-up screen and the keyboard just blinked (Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock) but still wouldn't cooperate. No matter what I did I couldn't get the keyboard to work so I plugged in a USB Mac keyboard and it worked so that I could look at all the BIOS settings... but then when it rebooted the monitor wouldn't turn on. I haven't been able to get a monitor to work with the Athlon since then and it doesn't seem to have onboard graphics (there's certainly nowhere to plug a monitor in besides the GFX card). Now I can't even get the start-up screen, sometimes the monitor is on (green light), but no picture, other times it is on standby. The FX 5200 didn't work at all and the 8mb card doesn't fit in the AGP slot.

This seems to be the same problem on three computers with two different AGP cards, each PC tested with at least 2 or 3 different monitors. The one thing the three PCs have in common (aside from the cables) is the 40Gb HDD that I bought from eBay. I only realised this today. I was told that I didn't need a HDD to get into the BIOS screen so I took the 40Gb drive out of the Athlon and tried it like that... the monitor was on (green light) but there was no picture. Very few errors show up on any of the PCs, although both the PIII and the P4 (since the FX5700 stopped working) have notified me that one of the HDDs thinks it might be about to fail. I searched dozens of forums and self-help sites over the months with no result and no help beyond "install the correct/latest drivers". The only thing that I found on Google was a single post by someone on one of the Microsoft forums that described my problem exactly, but the only response was "do not post these things here *locked*" from an admin.

This is the only error that showed up when the FX5700 failed on the P4:

Quote:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: nv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 14
Date: 28/12/2007
Time: 6:09:41 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SOKAR
Description:
The description for Event ID ( 14 ) in Source ( nv ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: \Device\VideoPdo0, L0 -> L0.
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 02 00 4e 00 ......N.
0008: 00 00 00 00 0e 00 aa c0 ......ªÀ
0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

Actually, surprisingly, that's different to what it was when it happened. Last time I looked it only said "L0->L0" and nothing else. I'll go look that stuff up when I'm done posting this. There have also been a number (a LOT) of W32Time errors, but I have ignored these because I assume they are only to do with the time.

One of my friends suggested back in June that I may have a BIOS virus, but that they are extremely rare. I know nothing about this sort of thing. If I did somehow get a virus or something that has ****ed my graphics cards then I must assume it came via the 40Gb HDD because I only D/L video clips on P2P and the occasional game/film trailer from official sites. Is it even possible that I could have some sort of malicious program that targets the AGP slot or nVidia cards? Could there be another explanation? I know this is long, but I wanted to put in as much relevant detail as I could think of. There might be stuff that's relevant I don't know about or something I've forgotten so if you think you might have a clue of what's going on I'm sure I could provide more detail.

Over 8 months of banging my head on the desk I am getting really, really, ****ing pissed off.

ce242 · 01-22-2008, 01:12 AM

Had the exact same error last night. Running a quadcore pentium and a BFG 8800GT graphics card. Doubt it is a virus thats causing it to be honest. Happens to me when I play Eve Online and Neverwinter Nights 2.

Anyone have any idea what we can do about this?

Going to check i have the most up to date drivers when I get home (pretty sure I have, the machine is only a week old!).

Thanks.

ce242 · 01-22-2008, 01:14 AM

Found something that might help:

Comment: This error occurs after installing the NVidia ForceWare driver Release 158 Version: 158.22 Windows XP /x86

Source: http://www.eventid.net/displayqueue....eventsource=nv

Looks like it may well be a driver issue, hopefully there is an update, will check when I get home.

ce242 · 01-22-2008, 01:17 AM

Well looks like nvidia have released newer driver sets, the version that caused problems is Release 158, newest drivers are release 169. Hope it solves your problem as well.

01-03-2008, 03:22 AM	#1 (permalink)
Sokar Rostau Registered User Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 1 OS: xp	Graphics card problems I've been having problems with my PC for around 8 months now. Actually, it's not the PC(s), but the graphics cards that have been having problems. My first PC (I had only used Macs before), a 700Mhz PIII, had a nVidia GeForce FX5200 AGP video card in it. It worked perfectly from the time I got it, in about July/August last year, until about April when it started having problems in NWN. When I first got it this PC had a 4Gb and a 10Gb HDD and I purchased a 40Gb one on eBay. The problem started in the level 3 quest area of the server I played on. The area was a sewer and was almost completely dark. At first I was able to get to the Boss before the monitor just switched off. I had to reboot the PC to fix it. That only happened once or twice. Then it started happening as soon as I entered the area - every time I entered the area. But I could play with my high level character in every other area I had access to (I actually never bothered trying to take that character into the sewers). After a few weeks it started happening to my high level character too only this time it was in two particular areas and one exact spot. The first area had a lot of lava in it and the second had a red mist. It got to the point where I would tell my party members to wait for me because I knew that I would have to reboot my PC when I got to the end of the red mist area, while it could happen anywhere in that area it happened 9/10 times at that door. This went on for a while and I tried replacing drivers etc. but nothing worked. I thought maybe it was just that particular server using areas with lots of one colour or something... until it started happening first in "normal" areas on that server and then on other servers as well. It got worse soon after with the monitor switching off while viewing text-only PDFs and then sometimes while simply browsing the web with Firefox. By then I was starting to look for a new GFX card because I thought it was screwed. In the interim my friend gave me an old 8mb GFX card which had no issues at all. Being a poverty stricken student I tried to find a bargain on eBay for months and always lost the best auctions in the closing 5 seconds. Things like FX5200s for $10 there's always 20 people bidding in the last 30 seconds. It took me so long to find a new GFX card that when the opportunity to buy a new PC came up in August at uni I grabbed it. $100 bought me a 2.4ghz Intel P4 with an 80Gb HDD, monitor and webcam... a huge improvement over my old P3. It has an onboard 64mb GFX chip so I have been using that to play NWN and Medieval Total War for the last few months. As expected, the FX5200 didn't work in the P4 either, so I still needed to find a new GFX card. A few days before xmas another friend of mine told me he had an FX5700 GFX card that I could have for $50. Another friend told him that I had **ty RAM (only 512mb) so he offered me his 1Gb RAM for another $50... then he said I may as well buy his whole system for $200 because he was about to buy a new one anyway. So now I have an Athlon 64, but because he isn't finished removing all his data from the HDD it isn't running just yet... and now I'm worried it's not going to run at all. Excited that I would finally have a GFX card I installed it on the P4 and played NWN and Medieval for a few hours before going to the shops and buying Medieval 2 because it was on special for xmas. I played M2TW for 3 or 4 days (and it worked flawlessly on medium settings) when, it seems, the GFX card problems started again. I had put my computer to sleep, as usual and when I woke it up in the morning it was fine for about an hour and then I launched NWN and it hung. Okay, ** happens, I used Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut NWN down, went back to the desktop and noticed that the colours on my desktop were a bit off (it looked sort of like 256k instead of 1 million colours). I figured it mustn't have corrected itself after NWN so I rebooted. I had only launched NWN because I wanted to check something for the forums so instead of starting NWN again I went back to there. It took less than a minute for my screen to go from vibrant colours to that weird 256kish looking thing again, only this time things were worse. Whenever I clicked on something the screen went blank for a second. Click on My Computer, screen goes black and when it comes back the My Computer panel is open. Click on Control Panel, screen goes black for a second and then when it comes back on the Control Panel is there. The only time the monitor didn't go blank when I clicked on something it didn't actually change on screen... until it went blank again and would come back with all the windows I had tried to open before all open at once. So... I thought maybe something had gone wrong when I rebooted so I rebooted again and this time nothing happened. The monitor simply wouldn't switch on. I tried again with the same result, the monitor just showed the orange stand-by light. I plugged the monitor into the onboard graphics and same thing, nothing happened. I unplugged the GFX card and then it worked perfectly. I have since managed to get a picture on the monitor twice with the FX5700 plugged in - the BIOS screen once and to desktop once with the same degraded colours and flashing screen. I put the GFX card into the Athlon along with my 40Gb HDD (It has had an empty 10Gb partition for the OS for months). At first nothing happened, but I don't know much about PCs so I fiddled with some cables and finally I got to the the AMD Athlon screen and then to the start-up screen (the one where you press Del to enter BIOS). Only problem was that the keyboard wasn't cooperating with the PC (something that had happened a few times with the P4 and FX5200). So I had to reboot, making sure the keyboard was plugged in properly, this time the same thing - I got as far as the start-up screen and the keyboard just blinked (Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock) but still wouldn't cooperate. No matter what I did I couldn't get the keyboard to work so I plugged in a USB Mac keyboard and it worked so that I could look at all the BIOS settings... but then when it rebooted the monitor wouldn't turn on. I haven't been able to get a monitor to work with the Athlon since then and it doesn't seem to have onboard graphics (there's certainly nowhere to plug a monitor in besides the GFX card). Now I can't even get the start-up screen, sometimes the monitor is on (green light), but no picture, other times it is on standby. The FX 5200 didn't work at all and the 8mb card doesn't fit in the AGP slot. This seems to be the same problem on three computers with two different AGP cards, each PC tested with at least 2 or 3 different monitors. The one thing the three PCs have in common (aside from the cables) is the 40Gb HDD that I bought from eBay. I only realised this today. I was told that I didn't need a HDD to get into the BIOS screen so I took the 40Gb drive out of the Athlon and tried it like that... the monitor was on (green light) but there was no picture. Very few errors show up on any of the PCs, although both the PIII and the P4 (since the FX5700 stopped working) have notified me that one of the HDDs thinks it might be about to fail. I searched dozens of forums and self-help sites over the months with no result and no help beyond "install the correct/latest drivers". The only thing that I found on Google was a single post by someone on one of the Microsoft forums that described my problem exactly, but the only response was "do not post these things here locked" from an admin. This is the only error that showed up when the FX5700 failed on the P4: Quote: Event Type: Error Event Source: nv Event Category: None Event ID: 14 Date: 28/12/2007 Time: 6:09:41 PM User: N/A Computer: SOKAR Description: The description for Event ID ( 14 ) in Source ( nv ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: \Device\VideoPdo0, L0 -> L0. Data: 0000: 00 00 00 00 02 00 4e 00 ......N. 0008: 00 00 00 00 0e 00 aa c0 ......ªÀ 0010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ Actually, surprisingly, that's different to what it was when it happened. Last time I looked it only said "L0->L0" and nothing else. I'll go look that stuff up when I'm done posting this. There have also been a number (a LOT) of W32Time errors, but I have ignored these because I assume they are only to do with the time. One of my friends suggested back in June that I may have a BIOS virus, but that they are extremely rare. I know nothing about this sort of thing. If I did somehow get a virus or something that has **ed my graphics cards then I must assume it came via the 40Gb HDD because I only D/L video clips on P2P and the occasional game/film trailer from official sites. Is it even possible that I could have some sort of malicious program that targets the AGP slot or nVidia cards? Could there be another explanation? I know this is long, but I wanted to put in as much relevant detail as I could think of. There might be stuff that's relevant I don't know about or something I've forgotten so if you think you might have a clue of what's going on I'm sure I could provide more detail. Over 8 months of banging my head on the desk I am getting really, really, **ing pissed off.

01-22-2008, 01:12 AM	#2 (permalink)
ce242 Registered User Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 3 OS: XP SP2	Re: Graphics card problems Had the exact same error last night. Running a quadcore pentium and a BFG 8800GT graphics card. Doubt it is a virus thats causing it to be honest. Happens to me when I play Eve Online and Neverwinter Nights 2. Anyone have any idea what we can do about this? Going to check i have the most up to date drivers when I get home (pretty sure I have, the machine is only a week old!). Thanks.

01-22-2008, 01:14 AM	#3 (permalink)
ce242 Registered User Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 3 OS: XP SP2	Re: Graphics card problems Found something that might help: Comment: This error occurs after installing the NVidia ForceWare driver Release 158 Version: 158.22 Windows XP /x86 Source: http://www.eventid.net/displayqueue....eventsource=nv Looks like it may well be a driver issue, hopefully there is an update, will check when I get home.

01-22-2008, 01:17 AM	#4 (permalink)
ce242 Registered User Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 3 OS: XP SP2	Re: Graphics card problems Well looks like nvidia have released newer driver sets, the version that caused problems is Release 158, newest drivers are release 169. Hope it solves your problem as well.