[coastie65]

All has been going fine. I had noticed a few minor graphics hiccups lately, but nothing that really got my antenna up. This morning I was merrily answering a post, when lo and behold my moniotor went into standby. Checked the cables and all was fine. Had to a hard shut which I hate to do. After a couple of minutes and checking around inside and a little cleaning ( Didn't really need it ), I restarted it and all was good for maybe 10 min. max, before it went into standby again. Had to yet another hard shut down. This went through several cycles and I had had enough. I scrounged up a VGA cable and switched to the onboard graphics. It is doing fine. I have ordered another EVGA 8600GT Card, only this one has 512 Mb of memory instead of the 256 MB I had on the other one. I got nearly two years out of it and a lot of game play in that time. Here's hoping the new one holds for a while, as those things are about extinct. coastie

[Flashorn]

Hey coastie !!



Sorry for your loss ! LOL !! I know what your going through at least you have

the option of Onboard. Maybe you should do with the 8600GT what you did

with XP and Stock Up !



Hope the new one installs with no problems.



FLASHORN. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

[coastie65]

HI Flashorn, :^0 Man, those things are getting as scarce as hen's teeth. I found one with 512 Mb of ram ( mine only had 256 Mb ). I'm thinking maybe I should have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, before ordering that card. Oh well. I probably also shouldn't have been so picky as I narrowed my search to EVGA. I did run across a GIGAbit and a PNY that was a little cheaper. I've used PNY in the past ( 7600GS ) and it wasn't too bad.

[Rommel]

I hope your new card solves your problems and serves you a long time.

My first build I bought a BFG 6800 GT OC, around $325. It was nearly the best money could buy at the time. About a year later it started to artifacts. RMA the thing and it failed the same way. After about four failures, all occurring at various times, they sent me a 7800 GS. Its been a long time and so far so good. I am fortunate this thing came with a life-time warrenty.

[mjd420nova]

Coastie: I can feel your pain, I've had to replace quite a few cards for users, some 128MB, some 256MB but no 512MB so far. I have one of each that are left over from older units that had other failures and were scrapped. So far my 1GB card has done very well, it is actually over powered for this unit and should last a long time. I've gotten it to run pretty good on the 1333MB bus and haven't gotten beyond the 1440 by 900 widescreen resolution yet. I tried a few higher settings but wasn't really too pleased with how it looked. I guess I'm to used to the WS settings.

[coastie65]

Hi all, It was doing fine, then I started running Oblivion at the "Very High " setting with all the settings maxed including the AA. after awhile it started hanging and then froze. I had another thought, but haven't followed through on it. I went to Nvidia's site and upgraded the drivers for that thing. In the the past when I did that, I was redirected to EVGA's site for the upgrade, but not the last time. They also included something called PhysX which was enabled. I have no Games to my knowledge that even support it, so I disabled it, thinking that may be an issue when I was playing Oblivion. Unfortunately, with these cards getting scarce, the folks that have them, are putting a premium price on them. I know the GPU temp was consistantly running 60C - 63C and I have run it to 73C on occasion. Now I am dealing with these less than great onboard graphics (ati Radeon x200 chipset).

[rgreen4]

As the other have said, at least you have that to fall back on. When I upgraded the card on this machine to an MSI 9800GT, I moved the MSI 8600GT to my Media Center. That machine had come with a no-name 7300LE (lame excuse). I wanted to upgrade the Media Center and fooled around until MSI 8600GT were no longer in mainstream retail channels. For the same price I could get the 9800GT and did. (I won't fit in the MC as it's a double wide card). The 7300LE is stored as an emergency backup. A spare functioning PCIx 16 card is always useful, even if it is a lame excuse one.

[mcbarker]

Coastie, I don't think that an 8600 is supported bt PhysX, so disabling it was probably the right thing to do.

I'm not sure that you'll have a lot of luck running Oblivion with the settings maxed on an 8600. By the way, the HDR setting gives better results than AA, but you can't run them both at the same time. Also, if your motherboard has an ATI chipset, you might have better luck using an ATI graphics card (just a thought). While you're fiddling around inside your computer, try checking the RAM modules. Take out all but one, then restart the system. Do that for each RAM module. If you have a bad one, that will find it. I recently had similar symptoms, and found one bad RAM module (after replacing my 2 x 8800's with a GTX 285).

[coastie65]

Hey mcb, Yeah, When I upgraded the drivers over there, I was a bit puzzled as the update covered the 8xxx, 9xxx, and the GTX 2xx series of cards and I thought that was a bit broad. When I had everything cranked up, those panoramic views in Oblivion sure did look good. :D As for the memory, maybe, although i had a PNY 7600GS go the same way, and I just out these two sticks of Crucial 667 Mhz in here not all that long ago and it has been doing fine. My further investigations online took me in the direction of a busted Card, but am not ruling out anything. I am begginning to think that maybe 256 Mb of Video ram mybe a bit short for some of the stuff i am running on here and that it is stressing the card to point of eventual failure. We'll see what happens when the 512 Mb card arrives. Incidently, the mobo is Intel, and I have no clue as to why they modified the thing and put that God awful chipset on there. When I looked up the MOBo on Itels site, it had been pretty much modified from the original design, with the exception of the Audio chipset. I think they changed out the Intel Mobo chipset with that of a Packard - Bell chipset. Essentially, it is an Intel mobo with third party stuff on it. Suppose I could swap it out with another Micro ATX mobo. That would mean wiping the Hdd and reinstalling everything from a new installation disc ( I have some ). Right now I'm feeling kinda lazy and and don't much feel like messing with it. :D

[mcbarker]

Yeah, I know the feeling... I just wiped and reformatted both my desktop and laptop a few weeks ago. I'm just now getting back to where I was before with them, but lost a few good freebies from the Giveaway of the Day site.

The thing I dislike about my Dell is the BTX form factor MB. They've been doing this with their desktops since 1998, making it impossible to install a decent ATX MB if the original one dies. As much as I like the performance of my XPS 720C, it's my last Dell. So far, I've had 3 bad RAM modules from them (Crucial factory OC), and a CPU replacement (because the original one wasn't as advertised). Next time, I'm going back to building my own. The last one I built was a Pentium, back in the early 90's, and it still runs like a champ with absolutely no problems or failures.

[Flashorn]

Hey cosatie !!


Well; the way I see it , it's time for a new build (Home made brew).

Not the run of the mill stuff from Best Buy !http://forums.pcworld.com/message/212604/!!



Here's your next build coastie !



Asus P6T6 Revolution Core i7 .



Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66 GHZ .



Corsair Core i7 DDR3 .



nVidia Geforce GTX 295 .



Case optional ??



If you can't play those little games with this then !http://forums.pcworld.com/message/212604/!!



FLASHORN. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

[coastie65]

Kust got an ad the other day from TigerDirect for a Kit. The case was plain Vanilla, but had good ventilation. It came with a Pentium D 965 processor ( 3.73 Ghz ). The mobo could handle a lot of other good processors as well. The price for the kit was $399.99, which I didn't think was too bad for what was included. XP MCE 2005 can be a bear to install as it is a bit tricky.

[coastie65]

Flashorn said:

Hey cosatie !!





Well; the way I see it , it's time for a new build (Home made brew).



Not the run of the mill stuff from Best Buy !http://forums.pcworld.com/message/212604/!!









Here's your next build coastie !









Asus P6T6 Revolution Core i7 .









Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66 GHZ .









Corsair Core i7 DDR3 .









nVidia Geforce GTX 295 .









Case optional ??









If you can't play those little games with this then !http://forums.pcworld.com/message/212604/!!









FLASHORN. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/

1!
>
[/quote]




Ummm, whose budget am I on? :D

[smax013]

coastie65 said:

Ummm, whose budget am I on? :D

I think [~60096] was offering to spring for it for you! ;)

Isn't that nice of him?!? :D

[coastie65]

Yep. I will go a long way to keeping me on budget. :D

[Flashorn]

Ok , you guys !!



coastie , if you need any help well, what are friends for ??

I'll send you all the pictures that you need !



FLASHORN. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

[smax013]

Flashorn said:

>

Quote

I'll send you all the pictures that you need !

Pictures are worth a thousand words, but words are not worth anything when trying to buy those components at NewEgg! ;)

[coastie65]

Right now, I'm back on the hunt for a Video card. They sold the last one before they got my order. I would prefer to have an EVGA, but may have to broaden my horizons due to the scarcity of those things. Oh Well.

[rgreen4]

Coastie, I'm not sure what price level you were looking at, but here is an EVGA 9800GT single width. Yes, it is PCIe2 x16, but I installed a PCIe2 x16 card in this machine with PCIe x16 slots and it works fine. In one way it would be future proofing for when you do get around to building your new machine. It is also a single width card. I don't know how long the card is, and if you have a short case, it may be a problem.
It does require the 6 pin power connector which the Antec 500 Basiq PSU may not have, but it comes with an adapter to connect to a molex connector.

[coastie65]

Depends on how long that card is. Anything longer than 10" or so, will put the end of it under the Hdd enclosure. With the 8600GT card, I had to pull it in order to change out my memory. It blocked the release thingies at that end of the DIMM slots. Yeah, it would probably give a performance boost over the 8600GT, but won't run at the full capabilities of the card, with it being in 1.0 Slot. Incidently. I was looking at this MOBO on Intels site and they list it as PCIe x16 1.0a Any way, I have some work to do. I just noticed one of my plugs cme loose. It was the Four socket plug on the 20+4 connecter. Gotta shut down and reconnect that. :p No, I don't know how came to be unplugged.