[SBC31]

Looks like my video card is dying on me. It's an Asus V9520 64MB AGP and is only 2 years old. I can't run any of the 3D tests using dxdiag.exe, and simply trying to preview a 3D Windows screen saver gives me the following:

What would cause a video card to do this? I take it I should just buy a new video card?

 

[V0lt]

It doesn't really look like a video card usually does when it's overheating...my first guess would be corrupt drivers or something similar. Video cards usually die abruptly when they do die; it's not a gradual thing from my experience.

 

[SBC31]

Strange, I've updated the drivers to the latest ones, even re-installed the original drivers to see if it would help.

 

[koala]

Have you tried reinstalling DirectX?

 

[SBC31]

I reinstalled DirectX, then all worked fine for about 5 minutes, but then all went back to not working.

Could this be a problem with my motherboard? the agp slot on it?

- Note also that my desktop is just a black screen, and many times I get little blue dots (pixels) stay behind until I select Refresh?
- Plus, when the PC boots up, I sometimes get unusual characters all over the place in the dos like window right before the Windows XP load up screen.

 

[koala]

If your motherboard has onboard graphics try switching to that to see if the problem is still there, or try another graphics card.

Also, check your PSU readings with Everest Home Edition, free from www.lavalys.hu/products/download.php?pid=1&lang=en
(click the Computer icon, then Sensor to see temperatures and voltage values)

 

[SBC31]

If your motherboard has onboard graphics try switching to that to see if the problem is still there, or try another graphics card.

Also, check your PSU readings with Everest Home Edition, free from www.lavalys.hu/products/download.php?pid=1&lang=en
(click the Computer icon, then Sensor to see temperatures and voltage values)

Since I don't have onboard graphics nor another video card, I will check the PSU readings with Everest Home Edition. What kind of values should I be expecting? Thanks for the suggestions so far, hope to get to the bottom of this.

 

[tinyhu]

have you checked the RAM on your system? I've run into similar issues on customers' computers, and the problem was usually one of two things- bad video card, or bad RAM chip. Bad RAM can cause many issues, including video issues. If I remember right, video drivers are temporarily loaded into RAM when your system boots up, so if you have a bad RAM chip, that could cause the video drivers not to load up correctly and give you video problems.

So, I would suggest running a RAM test. You can find a program for that online, can't think of any off the top of my head, but there are several pretty good ones out there.

 

[ebackhus]

www.memtest86.com

It's a slight possibility, but I think there'd be more errors than no D3D/openGL. It sounds to me like the geometry engine of the GPU has gone AWOL. Acronyms!

 

[SBC31]

www.memtest86.com
It sounds to me like the geometry engine of the GPU has gone AWOL. Acronyms!

So what does this mean? Do I need a new video card?

 

[SBC31]

RESULTS using Everest Home Edition:

Field Value
Sensor Properties
Sensor Type Winbond W83627HF (ISA 290h)

Temperatures
Motherboard 42 °C (108 °F)
CPU 40 °C (104 °F)
Aux 39 °C (102 °F)
Maxtor 6Y080L0 42 °C (108 °F)

Cooling Fans
CPU 2860 RPM
Chassis 5696 RPM

Voltage Values
CPU Core 1.49 V
Aux 1.50 V
+3.3 V 3.26 V
+5 V 5.00 V
+12 V 12.04 V
-12 V -12.53 V
-5 V -5.10 V
+5 V Standby 4.97 V
VBAT Battery 3.02 V
Debug Info F 76 ED FF
Debug Info T 42 40 39
Debug Info V 5D 5E CC BA C6 1D 34 (01)
-------------------------------------------------------

DISPLAY/GPU:

Field Value
Graphics Processor Properties
Video Adapter Asus V9520 Magic/64
GPU Code Name NV34
PCI Device 10DE / 0322
Transistors 47 million
Process Technology 0.15u
Bus Type AGP 8x @ 8x
Memory Size 64 MB
GPU Clock 250 MHz
RAMDAC Clock 350 MHz
Pixel Pipelines 4
TMU Per Pipeline 1
Vertex Shaders 2 (v2.0)
Pixel Shaders 1 (v2.0)
DirectX Hardware Support DirectX v9.0
Pixel Fillrate 1000 MPixel/s
Texel Fillrate 1000 MTexel/s

Memory Bus Properties
Bus Type DDR
Bus Width 64-bit
Real Clock 202 MHz (DDR)
Effective Clock 405 MHz
Bandwidth 3240 MB/s

Graphics Processor Manufacturer
Company Name NVIDIA Corporation
Product Information http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=products
Driver Download http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

nVIDIA GPU Registers
nv-000000 034200A2
nv-100000 00000000
nv-100200 19C10001
nv-10020C 04000000
nv-101000 A0C0E08B
nv-680500 00012502
nv-680504 00000F01
nv-680570 00000401
nv-680574 00000401
nv-68057C 80000701

 

[koala]

The readings look ok (much better than mine! I've got 13.5V on the +12V). Have you run memtest yet? You need to let it run for 10 passes, so it will take a few hours.

You could try changing the AGP from x8 to x4, but from what Ebackhus says, it doesn't look promising.

 

[SBC31]

The readings look ok (much better than mine! I've got 13.5V on the +12V). Have you run memtest yet? You need to let it run for 10 passes, so it will take a few hours.

You could try changing the AGP from x8 to x4, but from what Ebackhus says, it doesn't look promising.

What doesn't look promissing? Does this mean that my mother board is the problem or can I simply get a new video card?

Note also that I all of a sudden get yellow lines appearing now and again as highlighted in the screen grab below:

I've run Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic (BETA) and all seemed fine, the memtest stuff seems complicated.

 

[Volt-Schwibe]

uhh, if those lines show up in a screenshot, i don't think it has anything to do with the video card, or the monitor, i think it's more of a windows issue.

 

[SBC31]

uhh, if those lines show up in a screenshot, i don't think it has anything to do with the video card, or the monitor, i think it's more of a windows issue.

The lines don't just show up in the screenshot, they are on there when using windows. Also as noted earlier:

- My desktop is just a black screen, and many times I get little blue dots (pixels) stay behind until I select Refresh? Heck, just moving a window around makes these dots appear until I refresh.
- Plus, when the PC boots up, I sometimes get unusual characters all over the place in the dos like window right before the Windows XP load up screen.

 

[Volt-Schwibe]

what i mean is that issues with the video card and monitor happen after the screenshot is grabbed, further down the line.

the fact that they show in a screenshot tells me that it's not the hardware doing it.

 

[V0lt]

I think it could still possibly be a hardware problem. When I first looked at the screen shot, it looked pixeled out because the image hadn't loaded fully. Then I realized you were only posting that to show that it couldn't preview the screen saver.

Based on my experiences, artifacting due to excessive heat does in fact appear in screen shots- I once had this happen after I rebuilt with a new hard drive, and after noticing that the background was a little screwed up, I took a screen shot and compared it to the image as it was displayed reloaded in IE.

 

[UncleMacro]

- My desktop is just a black screen, and many times I get little blue dots (pixels) stay behind until I select Refresh? Heck, just moving a window around makes these dots appear until I refresh.

That can be caused by bad video RAM. If the frame buffer (where the screen image is stored) is bad then when the video card stores image data, the colors of the "bad" pixels are shifted because some of the bits are forced to 0 or 1. That changes the color of the bad pixels. It usually shows up as bunches of color shifted pixels spread across the screen but I guess if they lined up just right they could appear as complete vertical lines.

- Plus, when the PC boots up, I sometimes get unusual characters all over the place in the dos like window right before the Windows XP load up screen.

That's happening before the video card's drivers are loaded so the Windows drivers are not responsible for it.

ATITool has a 3D artifact checker which you can use on NVIDIA cards but I doubt you could even start the program if you can't get a 3D screensaver to work. I have seen people "fix" bad video RAM by underclocking it but other times the hardware is so broken that reducing the clock rate doesn't fix the problem. If you want to try underclocking then you can do it using CoolBits as described here.

 

[Compumaniac12]

now viruses dont usually do that kind of thing, only in movies or whatever.
if its not too hard to reformat, that may be something to try.

 

[SBC31]

now viruses dont usually do that kind of thing, only in movies or whatever.
if its not too hard to reformat, that may be something to try.

Re-formating is easy, but re-installing everything I have will take a long long time... Not too mention all the backups I will have to do.

The fact that I get messed up characters before the windows xp loading screen has me wondering what the heck is going on.