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Video display troublshooting

T_R_Oglodyte

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I'm pretty sure that my card is going bad, but before I immediately rush out to replace I thought I would pick some brains about other possibilities to consider.

Two times now, about one week apart, my display has suddenly gone wacko - just a jumble of colors - mostly blues, greens, blacks and white. Little to no flickering. It happens instantaneously - one moment I have display then a moment later it's gone.

I have two monitors connected - one HDMI and one DVI. Both monitors affected in the same way and at the same time, so I'm pretty sure we can rule out problems with the monitors.

Ultimately I do a hard shutdown, since I can't see anything to try to navigate to a normal shutdown. After I let the system sit shutdown for a few minutes, I can reboot and the normal display returns.

******

As I said at the outset, this seems to me like a video card starting to bite the dust. But is there anything else I should be thinking of?
 

T_R_Oglodyte

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PC message center had been saying for about one year that there was a problem with Nvidia graphics driver, but I never had been having problems. When I would use the Windows link to find a solution, it never returned anything specific and said "check again later". A couple of times I used Device Manager to check to be sure my driver was updated, and it always said I had the most recent driver. Since it wasn't really creating an problem I ignored the Message Center alert.

*****

Then it crashed on me again a few hours ago. So after rebooting I went to NVidia. First, the drivers page had a more current driver than the one I was using that windows said was current. When I used the NVidia scanning tool, it returned a BETA version driver that was even more recent. So I downloaded the BETA driver and installed.

We'll see what happens from here.
 

T_R_Oglodyte

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Hope it works.
Crashes continued, so I ordered a new video card (~$30 from Amazon). Arrived late today and just finished installing it.

Now to see if that solves the problem .....
 

hypnotiq

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Your video card could have been overheating, which can happen if the onboard fan starts to have issues (Which Ive seen on nvidia cards).
 

T_R_Oglodyte

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Your video card could have been overheating, which can happen if the onboard fan starts to have issues (Which Ive seen on nvidia cards).

Yeah - that occurred to me too. The card has it's own fan, though, so if it's a fan problem that still means a new card.

With the new card, I upgraded to 512 MB from 256 MB. The new card also does not have it's own connection to the main power supply, and the cooling fins have about 10x the surface area of the old unit. So I'm hoping that the new card uses less power as well as having more cooling capacity.
 
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