Wanky GeForce 256?

[Guest]

Several months ago I recieved a GeForce 256 from a friend. Playing Asheron's Call I found the card to be absolutely outstanding in 1280x1024 beating the hell out of my old voodoo3 2000. The graphics appeared slightly darker, really well shaded and gorgeous.

Problems arose as soon as I played Quake III, Star Trek Elite Force, Hitman: Codename 47 Demo and Soldier of Fortune, Halflife CStrike. Much of the textures were in a word screwed. Trianglar sections of screnery were appearing, white, sometimes flickering, a lot of the time appearing magnified.

I tried different drivers, tried OpenGL as well as Direct3d and the problems continued. No problems have ever been apparent working on the desktop..2d graphics completely fine and directx test pass ok.

About 1 week ago now ALL problems cleared up..all was working great. No changes to drivers, the system anything at all..and texturing problems disappeared. Weird! But of course I was happy...until last night when playing Counterstrike online.

All of a sudden the menu screens turned red on a black background, a few graphical glitches appeared on the screen and I was gunned down by a load of angry terrorists in the game. I powered down completely..fired up again a minute later...ran Quake III Arena as a test and the game menu was chunky..a lot of things were completely black and loads of glitches in-game.

I loved this card to death all the while it was working fine. Its a great card and maked my old voodoo3 look so bad. NVidia offers no support for the card since they only make chipsets.

Unfortunately I can't tell the manufactorer of the card at all by looking at it. It certainly isn't obvious..

I'm pretty sure that the card is faulty although I've not tested it in another machine. Should I explore other possible causes? The only other thing I can think of would be that its using too much system power perhaps and its not getting all it needs to run properly.

The details of the system are:-

Dual P3 550
250W ATX PSU
GA6-BXD Mainboard
384Mb RAM @ 100Mhz
4 IDE Hard Drives
1 UW SCSI Hard Drive
GeForce 256 32Mb AGP
SB Live Value PCI
2 NICs
Adaptec 2940UW
Advansys Ultra SCSI
Ricoh 6x2x2 SCSI
Plextor 40x SCSI
Matrox Millennium 4Mb PCI (for a second display)

With this long list of hardware I think that I may be overloading my PSU and the machine runs 24/7. The machine is running Windows 2000 and always has been completely stable.

I'd appreciate any advice and assistance anyone could offer. My questions are:

Could power supply be the problem?
How can I find out the manufactorer of the GeForce 256?
Am I overloading the PSU anyway?

Sorry this was a little long winded

 

[Guest]

Hey Bob,

This does indeed sound a bit wanky to be honest with you, especially the fact that it all cleared up and then went bad again. In any case, you do have a lot of hardware in the system and the GeForce cards, especially the .25 micron ones are known for their appetite for power. My suggestion to you is the old fashioned approach of trial and error, you have alot of hardware in the system and who knows what might be causing the problems, it could be the secondary display that you have, it could be anything. So, in steps, basically backup your stuff, remove the excess things from you system, that includes all the cards, leave the bare essentials, a hdd, a cd-rom and the geforce, then start adding things to it one by one and testing. If you don't want to jeoperdise your windows installation, since you have 5 HDD's, clear one out and use that for the testing. You'll get to the botton of it eventually. You are basically looking at either power consumption or some sort of incompatibility, don't forget that with all those cards in the system, windows must be sharing a bundle of IRQ's as well.

Good luck

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your post, I appreciate your opinion. I pulled out the card yesterday, just like I thought..no signs of a major problem with it visually. Not that I'm a an electronic specialist in the slightest..just looked for burn holes and fried chips The fan had little trace of dust..cleaned that anyway..the card didn't appear hot or anything either.

I agree that it deserves a little more testing before I bury the thing in the back garden just yet. Luckily a good friend of mine is giving me his old TNT2 Ultra. I'll throw together a test system on a bench and see what this GeForce 256 does running with a P2 400 on its own.

I've really cut down with the hard drives..I had 7 in there at one stage. Thank god the sizes of hard drives are increasing expenentially.

I'll post back with what that GeForce does..

 

[toonces]

sounds to me like your problem is definitley your power supply. i would get, at the least, a 300w power supply for what you say you're running. because the old geforce cards are known to be power hungry.

it sounds like your problems started when playing really graphics intensive games. asheron's call is online so the graphics have been toned down to improve bandwidth for the game data. but your other games will really work the geforce, especially at higher resolutions and therefore pull more power from your p/s.

even if it's not your p/s it doesn't sound like it would be a bad idea to upgrade anyway.

 

[Guest]

Fitted the NVidia TNT2 Ultra and it appears to play as fast as the GeForce256 with no problems at all.

I'll be trying out that GeForce 256 tomorrow. Interesting that you think its the psu causing the problem. I'll look into getting a 400w psu at some stage definately.

Thanks for responding

 

[Guest]

Intel SE440BX
PII 400Mhz
192Mb RAM
Windows 98SE
Directx 8
Detonator 3 Drivers

Tried this ol' thrown together system as a test for the card and sure enough numerous problems running Quake III Arena.

The intro movie seemed to play without showing on the screen. The ingame menus looked very dark. Once playing the game the skin textures were fluid looking and melted together.

Reflexions were all garbled and lighting was bright white.

Not a power problem after all but a seriously disfunctional graphics card. The performance of the card when it was working well is sufficient enough to make me buy another NVidia card definately.

I'll be chucking it on the next bonfire I think, so that its soul can escape to reach the sky..