Hey Guys,

My friend house got struck by lightning about a week ago and just about everything electronic in the house got fried including his computer & mouse. However we decided to test some of the parts and wo and behold his Radeon 9600 Pro seems to be working fine. I plugged it into one of my systems and windows loaded up fine on the card and everything looked great at face value. We haven't had a chance to stress test it with CS:Source or BF2, however I'm wondering if any damage may have occured thats not apparent. The actual card looks great, and we may hook another friend with it if its working fine while he upgrades.

Thanks for the tips!

if it works u should be kool

i wouldnt wrry about it

Can't say much more than uber_g, don't worry too much. If the videocard works, it works.

Don't complain, it might change it's mind.

if you can get a picture, and load up any game with no artifacts or no problems whatsoever, your in the clear man

Hmm, Strange situation. Basically in my computer the graphics card seemed to work fine but on another friends the computer loads up but he doesnt get any video at all from the Graphics card.

This is strange since it was seemingly fine with my computer. The only difference is my computer has on-board video and his does not. But in both cases the Monitor was plugged into the Radeon card, so somehow the Radeon Card must have been working enough to relay the Onboard videos output?

We figure its that or the other PSU which was very low voltage like 275watt perhaps wasn't supporting the 9600 Pro/xt, even though its the "lite" version :|

u need to re-install the drivers n such

Well he's actually not getting any Video initially even at boot :|

Then it's fried to a crispy charboil. Sorry about your friends system, I doubt the warranty is still good on that graphics card.

8O oops

^^

Homeowners gave him $800 towards a new system (really good valuation), and he picked up a new Dell (Ironically pretty lame, but different story).

I'm just confused as to how I was getting video from the card if its fried :|

i dont think it is fried. not if it works in any computer that is. sometimes some chipsets are incompatible. i had a heck of a time getting a 9600pro to work on a cheap PcChips board with a VIA chipset. just my .02

Did you disable the onboard video?

EDIT: Nevermind, didn't quite read the initial post.

Just out of curiosity, did he have his computer plugged into a surge protector or ups? Most of those come with warranties that will cover what was plugged into them.

If it's covered under the house insurance then it doesn't really matter but maybe look into it... I want to hear if anyone has ever successfully claimed a warranty on a power bar / surge protector.

I'm about 99% sure thats not the case, in-fact I think he wasn't even using a power strip. He now has a surge protector.

Surge Protectors are for just that surge. Lightning = Mambo Surge.

On my last job my integrators installed Varistors into certain outdoor equipment that were specifically designed to take a hit from lightning and keep the rest of the equipment isolated from the load.

When one actually got hit, it fried the varistor (you should have seen this thing) and then jumped to finish off the rest of the equipment.

A surge suppressor will help when your utilities surge and or with the right strike from lightning but a direct hit will surely take them out! Warranty or not!

Expensive Surge Suppressors (with large guarantees) = not worth the money.

*Update*

So I went back to my other friend who is attempting to install the Lightning Videocard, and we re-installed it and still ran into the issue of the computer not giving us any video output at all. We assumed the card was friend, but I noticed that the card still looking relatively good, capacitors fine/etc.

So I went back to my house and installed it in my AGP system again, booted, and was prompted for drivers. Grabbed those and tested the card and worked great in CS:Source, no fragmenting for at least two hours, solid FPS, just like normal.

So now I'm confused as to why it won't work in my others friend system which is running a PNY FX5200, so you'd think it could support an only somewhat newer card the 9600 XT Lite.

did u un-install his nvidia drivers ???

i hope u did ...

Nope......I know its an obvious way to go about it however I've grown accustomed to onboard video kicking in on my computers which will then let me uninstall & install once I've confirmed the item is not DOA.

...But his computer doesnt have onboard video and thus...

We just updated all of his chipsets, so I'll go by in a bit after work and see if thats not the issue.

8O


ok ?

Well strangely enough even with removing the Nvidia Drivers and putting the 9600XT in, it still doesnt output any video.

I'm confused now, as to how I can even get some basic ATI Drivers in place to at least allow me to enter safe mode and thus get the drivers on in the first place :|

what motherboard is it ??

You're going to have to post the full specs on the system that doesn't work with the card.