this seems like a bad video card, but is it?

[liljim]

Heres the first pic, looks like a card at the end of its rope

Notice the pixelation on the bottom half.




To make it interesting, heres pic 2

This is the bios splash screen with the same type pixelation


Heres 2 pics with garbled text,yet no pixelation, the first is a post screen, second is obvious




Windows desktop has the pixelation but text is fine but after a couple reboots i cannot get back into windows. It crashes on the windows loading bar. Replace the card with a known working card and it boots everytime.


The vid card is an MSI Nvidia 7900GT and its not quite a year old. What has me really scratching my head is this machine had 2 of these in SLI and there both doing the same thing. I tried these cards in another board both together and individually and got the same result. The cards starting doing this "out of the blue", nothing changed that could have caused this. MSI has a live update feature to check for VGA bios updates but none are available for this card.

Has anyone seen this before or have a possible explanation as to why both cards gave out at the same time? Neither of these were overclocked and were installed in a pretty good case with adequate airflow. Both cards have working cooling fans.

At this point, its just a matter of curiosity as the owner already purchased 2 8600gt cards to replace these. I've tried everything i could think of and ran out of ideas so lets see if anyone else has any.

[Gecko]

liljim,

The first two images do look like a bad video card by the pixilation.
The other two images have no background color, less data less pixilation.

As for a cause, it could be a short power spike or a long power drop from the PSU.
Get out the volt meter and check the leads for the video cards from the PSU.

You could also try the and see if that helps.

[liljim]

Thank you Gecko,

I put these cards in my machine and nothing changed. I'll put 1 back in and check the voltage on the card. Thats an interesting link, i had no idea a pencil would effect an ohm level.

[liljim]

I had a resistance of 681 and the pencil got me down to 575 but i couldnt get a voltage reading at either point. The leads on my meter are to blunt for this project. The display wasnt any better after the pencil mod though and its crashing just before the loading bar. I found an nvidia bios editor that i think i will experiment with some, theres suppose to be voltage adjustments and so on available directly through bios settings.

[liljim]

I've found a few article about this that say the early editions of the 7900gt cards had a temp problem that resulted in damaged video memory. Im going to try to contact MSI and see if they can confirm this and possibly RMA the cards.

[Gecko]

[liljim]