Bad 9500np replacement?

[Cuda]

I finally got my RMA replacement for a bad 9500np from excaliburpc. The original card kept causing errors (claiming the power cable was not connected). Now I just put in the replacement (red pcb with L shaped ram, the one I sent back was black with I shaped ram).
With this new card, I can't run 3dmark03, BF1942 and I have strange display problems, blueish tints in white background windows and once a blue screen claiming the video driver caught up in an infinite loop, and the device had failed. I am using the updated drivers from ati and have also tried the original drivers on the cd and also the soft-mod drivers (omega).

At 1024x768 the blue problem goes away but still unable to run 3dmark03, I get the following errors:
Your system does not support:

Bilinear texture filtering
multitexturing with at least 2 textures
cube textures
compressed textures (DXT1 and DXT3)
Framebuffer alpha
Stencil buffer

then it says:

"Your system cannot run any game test of 3dmark03."

Does this sound like another bad 9500np?

[Cuda]

I re-installed directx9.0 and can now run 3dmark03. However, I get blocky video, not really checkerboard (artifacts?) running this driver: 6.14.10.6387

It appears to be an ati driver, but I'm not certain. If I try to use any other driver, I get either a "hard error" blue screen or no boot, just a black (dead) screen. I have tried omega 3.7 and 3.9 drivers as well as updated drivers from sapphire. I still have some small vertical lines on the desktop icons.

Has anybody had any kind of problem like this??

(edit) The omega drivers I used are NOT the soft mod drivers.

[CamH]

Have you tried anything in the BIOS? Different AGP speeds, no fast writes, that stuff...

[Cuda]

In desperation I reset the bios to default, no help.

[CamH]

Why don't you try messing with the different AGP settings? I had to turn off fast writes to get my 9500 going right.

[fazz33]

try it on another computer or...if you wanna go all the way, reinstall a clean OS. if your CPU is overclocked without fsb locks try running at the CPU's stock speeds

[Cuda]

I just tried it with fast writes disabled. Also, I am running at bios defaults, no overclock.

[fazz33]

oh and forgot to mention if you had any other video cards install make sure drvers (driver fragments) are all gone

[Cuda]

my temp video card was an old Blaster Savage 4 pci card. It used windows drivers.

[fazz33]

ic did you try to set agp settings, check if its on its max

[Cuda]

AGP aperture is at 64. I also tried it at 256.

(edit) AGP buss is locked.

[fazz33]

try 128 agp aperture.

[Cuda]

128 agp aperture...same results

This is p***ing me off. I'm going to sleep on it and try more tomorrow. I think it's a bad card.

[fazz33]

check the direct X and open gl setting. bye and good night

[Cuda]

More info:

I went into safe mode and uninstalled the ati drivers then deleted every ati file I could find. I then did a clean install of the latest cat drivers I downloaded just a little while ago from ati's site.

When I rebooted, I got this message:

VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands.

Then I get this message:

VPU Recover was unable to fully recover from a hardware deadlock, and has switched to software rendering. To restore hardware rendering, you must restart your computer.

When I restart, I get the same messages. Is this a bad card?

I don't get those messages with the windows drivers, but I get a lot of artifacting (I think thats what it is).