I Think My Video Card Died
At least I think its the video card, I am pretty sure it is. Whenever I load anything that has to do with 3D my computer freezes after a few seconds. It started eariler in the day when I noticed some graphic problem’s in a game. That didn’t alert me because that game has given me issues before.
Fast forward to the time the Team Fortress 2 pyro update was released. Everything was running fine for a while, I was even able to unlock all of the weapons. Although I did notice some issues with the overlay right after I loaded the game. Ingame problems didn’t start until later. The game began to freeze up for a few seconds and then come back. That kept happening, so I figured it may be a heat issue. Upon loading up the oldschool nvidia control panel, yes you can do that in the latest drivers, and checking the temperatures they appeared to be fine. I decided to turn up the fan’s though and this is when the computer crashed. I was able to play for a little bit longer after it restarted but there were graphic problems constantly. Finally it came to a point where any 3D would crash the computer.
This was not a power issue, I am running a 500watt continuous powersupply (it is rated for SLI) in a machine that doesn’t even have 2 video cards. I took the video card out and it was pretty clean, only a little bit of dust on it, and the fan still worked. After putting it back in there are constantly graphic problems, even in 2D.
Later tonight/tomorrow I am going to try our other video card to check if it is actually my video card that is giving me issues. If it is my video card then I’ll buy a new one on newegg. I’ll probably buy a new EVGA card, this EVGA 6600gt has done a good job so far plus they have a limited lifetime warrenty on their new cards. I was thinking about getting a GeForce 8600gt. It would probably be overkill for my machine, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Socket 939 (I can only find upgrades on ebay). But this type of card supports Nvidia’s CUDA, which means I could run folding@home on it. Awesome!
