Suddenly unstable, crashes, general crappyness

[Diggrr]

Just for giggles, and it's free, check out the mounting of the hsf on that GF4. The crud they use could have easily dried out by now, making heat an issue for your gpu.
And while it's out of the system, clean the contacts with an eraser..that saved a card of mine from the skip.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

I'd do that if I had a way of getting the heat sink back *on* the card. It's held in place by two black pieces of plastic, and if I broke those, it wouldn't stay on.

Well, whatever. I can't get the thing off. The little black plastic clips just won't work in reverse. I'm going to RMA it to MSI anyway, and then let my dad have it when it gets back. I'll call Fry's later and look for something else.

The GeForce2 looped UT2k3 for about 6 hours (or however long I was asleep) and got no errors. I'll try this card again in a few minutes, but I think I've already made up my mind on what the problem was.

 

[Oni]

Well, that's a good thing. Y'know, it might've also been the AGP slot on your K7S5A (I've heard of those going out), but if you replaced it, it's pro'lly not that.

I didn't think MSI was still around to RMA cards to. I thought they stopped, or something. Maybe it was a different vendor.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

Well bugger all to hell. I drove to Fry's today again, wasted half a tank of gas and almost got myself killed twice in this crappy traffic. I put down $140 for a brand new GeForce4 Ti4200, since that was the cheapest card available that wasn't ATI and wasn't crap. I opened the box in the truck to check that the card wasn't physically damaged. The box said the card was 4x AGP, but the sticker on the back said 8x AGP. Uh oh.

So I get home and plug it in. UT2k3 doesn't run for crap. The framerates were fine, but I got graphics corruption and flickering geometry. The Event Viewer still spills out this error, over and over again:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: nv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 13
Date: 5/24/2003
Time: 3:17:04 PM
User: N/A
Computer: THEPERFE-15LCRR
Description:
GR SW Notify Error on 0001 d3d09701 00000597 00001d80 00000001 00000020
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 02 00 4e 00 ......N.
0008: 00 00 00 00 0d 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 ........

The only thing it could be now is that I never noticed these errors before, and that SP3 and the 41.09 nVidiot drivers suddenly decided to become a monumental pain in the ***. It's down to this - if my old GeForce4 can run UT2k3 and 3DMark and Sandra and so on, straight for several days stable, then I'll just ignore the errors and get on with my life.

I hate computers.

The only good thing about this is that I can get my $140 back.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

Alright, I just tried the 43.00s. I *think* the issue has gone away. I loaded up UT2k3 and immediately noticed that the corpses no longer fell through the floor after switching drivers. Each time that happened, an error would be written to the Event Log. I finished a match on DM-Plunge with max detail (20 fps! w00t!) and nothing was written to the Event Log.

I believe I have, indeed, "fixed this *****". Now, if you folks will excuse me, I have a machine to format before my graduation party starts.