New 3D card- broken?

General Discussions
#1

So I got a nice GeForce 6600 GT video card for christmas, but as yet it’s been no end of problems. I started out fitting it then discovered it needed it’s own power cable and didn’t have enough sockets on mine so I couldn’t use it that day. Next day I went out and got a power cable splitter. Now it worked but when I loaded Morrowind in to see how it looked, the screen went black and could not be persuaded to work again.

As I’d already done the whole driver download thing I figured it must be a problem with the power supply and went and bought myself a better, stronger PSU which I then fitted. That made absolutely no difference but on a whim I tried testing it with another game, possibly X2. It worked a treat. Was by this time a little miffed with Morrowind for having potentially tricked me into buying a new PSU. Noticed that Morrowind does run windowed. Doubly miffed. Found an issue with some NVidia cards where it can sometimes set the refresh rate to something that some LCD screens can’t cope with and made sure that was overriden. Morrowind now appears to work fullscreen but any game I play seems to only give me a few minutes before I lose signal to the monitor, which cannot be restored, although the computer appears to be otherwise unfazed.

Can anyone think of any other useful things to do or should I be trying to take the video card back as faulty?

#2

Try downloading the Doom 3 demo and see how that goes. nVidia worked closely with ID to make sure the 6600 GT worked well with it. Infact, that’s the card that Carmack himself used for development. If Doom 3 gives you problems, then the card is borked.

#3

More often than not problems with 3d cards come down to crap mobo agp drivers, not the card itself (or its drivers).

Having said that, Nvidia are quite good at releasing ‘updated’ drivers that break old games.
I’ve had to roll back to slightly older drivers for a number of games, C&C Generals springs to mind.
(For a time, I had rather annoying scenario where Battlefield 2 would only work correctly with the latest drivers - and Generals would only work correctly with a slightly older driver. Thankfully, It has since been fixed.)

Another issue I’ve run into is overheating.
It would manifest itself as graphical corruption after 10-15minutes of use (when the gpu reached around 82degrees!)
However, it would only occur in some games (in particular ones that made heavy use of the card.)
If you are getting a time related failure, check the gpu core temp. (you can get at it through the nvidia extensions in display properties)
A correctly functioning card should not go much above 50degrees.

#4

Sicen your previous card did not require external power, Id be concerned about the size of your power supply. NVidias are power hogs. If you are running less thne 400W you may want to swap up.

#5

I did the power supply a couple of days back so that’s on 450 watts now (and a relatively classy 450 watts, which hopefully means it) so I’m hoping it’s not that. Mobo drivers were all upgraded when the problem started (n-force motherboard so quite easy to do) but to no obvious avail.

I did some bios tweaking and noticed I could adjust the voltage handed to the AGP slot and after notching that up by 0.5 of whatever the units were it seems to have been ok. Of course, with any inconsistent problem you can never be sure it’s gone, but I’ve just been able to play a bit of Fable whilst thinking “ooh, look at all the glowy shader effects” and it hasn’t fallen over at all yet so I’m optimistic. Groundlessly, no doubt…

#6

Without being able to actually see your system take this for what it’s worth, but I believe that you have solved the problem. Same issue with my system board and the ATI Radeon 9700 that I run. The power requirements of that card dictate that you need to increase the voltage. I am 99% sure that you solved your problem. Check around on Toms Hardware or Hard OCP to validate. Another thing you can do is download the Futuremark benchmark and have it loop to stress your card. If, after a few passes, everything is still ok, you’re there!

-Chris

-Chris

#7

It was going so well, but today the same problem :frowning:

Very irritating. I think it may be a dodgy card…

#8

I have the same card. When I first bought several months ago, I picked up a 450 watt PS to go with it. I had intermittent problems with the card for near two months until my PS died. In fact, I had bought a new montior thinking it had gone bad. My symptoms were a bit different from yours. The monitor didn’t just go black, it actually powered off. I picked up a 550 watt (Enermax) and have had no problems since. The extra monitor was no loss, as now I run two. I don’t know how I lived without before.

One other thing - you say your card came with its own power cable. So I assume that means there’s no slot for the PS to plug in to? Mine had no power cable, but did come with a slot on the end where the PS needs to plug in.

#9

[quote]One other thing - you say your card came with its own power cable. So I assume that means there’s no slot for the PS to plug in to?
[/quote]
No it came with a socket for a power cable but between two hard drives and two CD drives I didn’t have a cable to attach to it, so I had to get a cable splitter. When I got my new PSU it had loads of leads so the card is now on it’s own power line.

#10

No it came with a socket for a power cable but between two hard drives and two CD drives I didn’t have a cable to attach to it, so I had to get a cable splitter. When I got my new PSU it had loads of leads so the card is now on it’s own power line.
[/quote]
Since my 6600GT PCIE doesn’t have a molex slot, I suppose yours is an AGP. IIRC, there were many issues when the AGP debuted, especially with the XFX make.

I’d check the +12V rating of your power supply. And if you can, try to boot with a single HDD and no CD drives (bcoz they also suck some from the +12V line) and see what happens. A few other options would be: the mobo bios, AGP aperture settings, and the card bios.

Check also the nvidia forums. This one for example:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4758

#11

What temp. is the card running @?

oh, and after how long does the problem occur?

#12

It was running fairly cool and dying as soon as it tried to run anything fullscreen that used 3D accelleration.

Took it back to the shop today- turns out it is a faulty card. I’m kind of relieved really. I thought it shouldn’t be that hard to get it working.