video cards: broken(?) and new

Firstly, as for the 9800GTX being worth more than the GTS. No. The GTS is far better value and performs very similarly to the GTX.

One way to check and see if your card is faulty is to take it out and use your onboard graphics (if you have it) to see if the problem persists. This will not be definitive however, as you don't provide any details about what is actually wrong.

I say if you have the money, go for the GTS. What are your other system specs?

The 9800gtx is really only a rebranded GTS (G92) with slightly faster memory, and added support for 3 way SLI. The actual performance difference though is very, very small. In some benchmarks the 8800 wins, in some the GTX wins. Unless you plan on running 3 way SLI, I'd save my money and get a 8800GTS (g92).

cool, thanks!

Might pick myself up the 8800 tommorow or friday,

as for my sys specs:

i'm runing win XP SP2 on a
INTEL D945GTP motherboard with dualcore 3.0ghz pentium cpu
1gb of 667mhz ram (i think ...cant remember off the top of my head or find it..)
thermaltake toughpower 850w psu

onboard sound/network

The problem has just been slowly growing,
starting with red pixels in fixed places (not my monitor tho, i can take screencap's of them, and when I move a window without updating it, it draws a line, sorta like holding a pen steady and moving the paper)
I also had some probably regular artifacting , with the whole stretching of parts/points of textures/objects "going to infinity", dont know the official name

more recently it has started getting "dead frames", where it just goes black for a frame, repeatedly every few frames for a short while (.. i generaly point the screen to as little as possible as quick as possible.. lol), a couple times before i could turn the pause was a few seconds at its length, until i tried to play Timeshift last night, didnt take more than 5minutes before it started having these "dead frames" .. only a couple happend, then it went black, and eventualy windows spat up the "n4_disp.dll has gone in an infinite loop" message, (eventID 108, source nv), it did it a second time this morning, and hence have decided i'm going to once and for all fix this as i cant play anything anymore now wihtout problems  

The GTS would be bottlenecked by that system quite a bit in my opinion. Consider an upgrade to 2GB of ram with prices so cheap.

Also, I know it is expensive but the cpu and motherboard may need an upgrade to make full use of that graphics card.

yeah  

that is the plan,
i was hoping my current system was going to hold out till the end of the financial year so i could use my tax check on it !,..

guess not tho, lol, might see if i can squeeze in some ram too, thatll ease the transfer somewhat while i have to wait,
thanks theTHiiiNG and jitpublisher

No worries, glad to help out a fellow aussie  

Definitely go the RAM upgrade though. 2GB costs $50 for that speed. You would notice an instant speed boost. Get it with the money you save from not buying a 9800GTX.  

Whats the fault condition? and whats your power supply? Amps on 12V if you can find it.

fault condition?
uh,
The side of the box states 4 independant 12v: with 18A, 18A, 30A, 30A on them


any reccomended RAM i should get? (throw out the current and get 2 new sticks?, or stick to cheap equal to what i have so when i do get to upgrade the rest, i can get newerbetterfaster ram?)

I say with the prices as they are just get 2 new 1gb sticks so they run in dual channel mode. The sticks will need to be identical for this to happen.

Anything by Corsair or Kingston should be decent. Unless you want to overclock it, which I'm guessing you probably don't, nothing too expensive should be fine.

You stated at the start that the current might be faulty but you didn't know...

So why do you think it is faulty? PS looks fine plenty of power, but an underpowered PSU can cause GPU conditions that might make you think its faulty. As PSU's age you may find that it is now not as good. But you have plenty of power.

Memory might also cause 'stuttering' and slow downs which you may think are GPU related.

However if you just want to buy a new one, go right ahead... its all part of the fun.

have you tried re-installing the drivers, the condition you describe a little up the page could be driver related.

just to be sure it's not something dumb, I'd reinstall the video drivers and give your old card one last shot. or if you have a friend with a computer, see if he/she will let you put your card in their system to test it out.

i'm not trying to discourage an upgrade, just looking out for a fellow poor person. the gts will be a significant upgrade, but you're going to have to move to 2gigs of RAM to really enjoy your gaming experience. your processor will probably be ok for a while. Sure, it will bottleneck the gpu, but getting 120fps won't matter if your screen operates at 60hz. What matters is that you have smooth gameplay.

Is your monitor fairly recent? I had that problem with an old monitor which could not live up to the new video card expectations.

Oooh, i did?
sorry 13th monkey if there was confusion (:
I dont think the psu is faulty, i had to buy a new one fairly recently because the one that came with the computer was going to blowup (not literaly  ) if i didnt replace it ,... the fan was prettymuch hanging off grinding away lol


what i ment to say,
i'm fairly sure that it is my video card that is faulty,
however, i'm not going to rule out that it is the motherboard, cpu, or the ram (without knowing how to properly check, itd be nieve to rule them out)



but yeah, considering how much i'm using my computer i dont think having a throttled 8800 is gonna bug me ;p, gogo Metroid on the Wii
.. and exams .. (soon)

either way if theres a jitter i dont mind, only if theres a jitter   beats freezing the computer in an infinite loop!


Ill be trying it, rerolling the drivers, chances are low, but!~, .. going to try ... *crosses fingers*,
(will first try older drivers .. ..yay for not deleting things being useful,.. once? lol)

my monitor is a benQ FP93GX, about half as old as my system (system is around 2years old)

havent had any troubles with my lcd screen tho so, at least one part of my system works ;p  

don't roll back, nvidia drivers (like many others) are insidious, use an un-installer and then reboot and re-install. I agree the PSU looks sound.

You can check out most of the other parts of the system by testing it as if you were overclocking, i.e. orthos/prime_95 something like that to stress the CPU and Memory if they are having problems then orthos/prime should uncover it, watch your temps when you do it.

Make sure you properly remove your current drivers before installing any new ones. Use a program like Driver Cleaner to do this.

With what you have described its gotta be the Video Card one way or another. Either the drivers will need to be changed or it could be overheating IMO. My bet is also drivers as "n4_disp.dll has gone in an infinite loop" is a driver error.

woot! ,... internet reset on me while i was replying,.. hah! ..


I'm doing well tho  
what i ment by rollback was not the rollback of windows (forgot that was even there  ) but a removal of the drivers and using an older version

but yeah, when looking up on the inifite loop part, i came across a post where the persons video card was actualy physicaly damaged ,. partialy,..
so ,. the overheating has always been my concern/possible answer,...

either way,.. drivers dont uninstall themselves ;p

You may not need an earlier driver, just try a fresh install of your current driver.

like I said earlier if you want the upgrade, go for it... but if you can prove to yourself that the old one works it may form the basis for a second machine, or be sellable.

What does Rivatuner say your temps are when you have problems? could be a simple cooling issue.

Good luck.

mm, well i'm now on 94.24,. tried Overlord with increased settings,.. saw the odd artifact (the polygon point going to infinity),..

pity its hard to reproduce the infinite loop .. lol

strangely today the video card has been running cooler, ..
whether thats because i *thoroughly* cleaned it today,.. or its a cool day,
its hard to pick. we'll what happens when i try use it more

well, yes it is running a tiny bit cooler,

but not a big deal,
i saw it peaking around 68C, around a similar time where i saw some "dead frames" so .. new drivers (old and current) didnt save me this time  

oh well, thanks nonetheless   means i get a new toy tommorow,
shiny!


Cant think of anything else to try right now,.. oddly the red dots have decreased quite a bit,.. and i saw a green one 5minutes ago! lol

tommorow, assuming i go ahead with this,
I'm going to try see what happens if i install new ram first, play around a bit, likely hoods its the ram is rather low, but still...
Then ill insert the 8800gts,

*hopefuly* that solves all!
otherwise we will know its neither the ram or video ;p


edit: oh, and it wasnt rivatuner i used, it was nTune since i already had it / use it to check the temp of the gpu etc

Well,.. I'm currently on the default ugly res, on my onboard video,


no red dots! sofar,. so i think its safe to say that it was my video card which is now sitting on my desk,.

time to go and get a new 8800gts (:

thanks for all the help  

Yay!! ,..


sorta..

not really,
They were out of stock for the asus 8800gts,.. at both stores, Lol


oh well, looks like my car gets serviced before my video card, (that and i dont get to play much in the way of heavy 3d games)

edit::
oh ,.. and its funny how while i left it running through my onboard video i didnt see one red dot, yet the moment i put my 7900 back in,.. *bam!* red dot(s) .. lol

Well there ya go. What you have described pretty much confirms it is a hardware problem.

Good luck and have fun with your 8800GTS! That thing is a beast.  

thanks hehe  


pity they are out of stock  
that and my car decided to try and spitthedummy at me,..so uh .

I have to delay buying it!   lol

computers and cars are fun, so sensitive, and sometimes so expensive to fix   hehe