Leadtek nvidea gforce 6800le..problem

Hi ppl,
Well today my graphix card decided to give me the thumbs down and it is not even 2 years old..The problem is this..When i boot up it works fine within a desktop environment but in a game like titan quest for instance or even the sims2 it plays through the intro,s fine but as soon as the main page comes up it shoots out polygone triangles and you can hardly see anything..The card is a leadtek nvidia gforce 6800le with 128mb ram-256bit data transfer..My pc has win xp prof,1gig ram,2.0 gig processor and a asrock m/board ge pro m2.

I have tried to install the latest drivers,forceware etc.. but to no avail..We then put my old nvidia geforce 4 mx4000 ,128mb card in and it works fine everywhere.Any ideas or is the card lost?

thanks
vanman

Hmmmm, download this and run it:

http://freestone-group.com/video-car...ility-test.htm

It is a video card stability test ;)

It sounds as if your card has some damaged memory to me?

:(

EDIT: That is just a guess, as it could be the GPU, but my limited experience is that when the GPU goes south, the card doesn't work at all?

I had the same problem once with a 2 month old ATI card.. Turned out the fan wasn't spinning so the GPU got to hot.. Solved it by replacing the faulty fan with a zalman passive cooler.

Yes, that is a good point SirDice, I had a similar experience with a card straight out of the box (also ATi :D). Fortunately I use a laser guided hand held spot meter...............the thing got very hot with the box on "idle" let alone under load. I would have expected the lack of a fan to show up even in "office mode"?

Heat could still be a problem, maybe replace the thermal compound with silver-based and give the fan a good clean.

I could have misinterpreted the original post, I got the impression the this happened as soon as he went into the games, but it ran office functions without it ever happening? :confused:

//my videocard story: I went on this game website and looked through the discussion forum. A guy had posted a screen capture rather like vanman is describing. The next guy posted:

"Hey man! can you tell us who "deals" for your video card? it looks like he sells good stuff!" :D //

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nihil

I got the impression the this happened as soon as he went into the games, but it ran office functions without it ever happening? :confused:

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That was the same effect I had. Regular windows apps on 1600x1200, no problems. But as soon as a game started using the 3D hardware I got crap looking polygons everywhere.

The reason I bought a passive cooler was simple. If I returned the card I would have received another one. That one would probably have the same crappy fan on it and it would probably fail again after a couple of months. A passive cooler doesn't have any moving parts so it's quiet and lasts forever :D

(As an added bonus I was able to overclock the card all the way to it's max without any problems :) )

Thanks guys:D I forgot to add that the fan is running and the temp when it was still in my machine was round about 42-52 deg (gpu temp)monitored.I also saw that the default gpu threshold was set at 127..My led indicators show the temp as normal..

{I could have misinterpreted the original post, I got the impression the this happened as soon as he went into the games, but it ran office functions without it ever happening?}Exactly right nihil that,s what bugs me as well..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SirDice

The reason I bought a passive cooler was simple. If I returned the card I would have received another one. That one would probably have the same crappy fan on it and it would probably fail again after a couple of months. A passive cooler doesn't have any moving parts so it's quiet and lasts forever :D

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Did this solve your problem?Does it fit exactly or did you have to make mods to the card?

Hi vanman, I have just had another thought, thanks to SirDice.

Is that card "factory overclocked"? or have you overclocked it?

Please try returning to the chipset manufacturers' specifications and see if that makes a difference. ;) OK the performance will go down, but I am just seeing if we can get the card to work properly.

I have actually encountered a couple of instances where these factory overclocked cards started to misbehave. I advised the users to manually reduce the speeds and gradually build them up to the fastest stable settings for their individual cards.

It is a long shot, but worth a try?:)

Hi nihil,I am not sure if it is factory overclocked but it does have the capability to be overclocked but i have never used it..The original settings worked fine for me..By the way this card has a red copper heatsink the size of the card just about,with the fan mounted on top..One other thing is that i decided to upgrade my bios about 1 and a 1/2 years back.Reason mainly being that my processor is a genuine intel 2.6 gig but runs at 133x13=1733gig.One pin of the processor was broken off long ago by some guy at a pc shop..Anyway since i have upgraded the bios i was able to run the pc at 2gig,by increasing the bus to 155x13=2.01 etc..Ran well but my question is this..Doesn,t the increase in bus speed also proportionally increase the i/o cards speeds?It does if i remember correctly..Could this have caused the malfunction in the long run?

At the moment the card is out of my machine and i am running with the old one still..

I found this:

Quote:

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As you see, these cards are made of defective NV40 that have only 8 pixel and 4 vertex pipelines operable. Initially these were meant only for system builders, not for retail. However leakages resulted in tricked customers (6800LE looks like 6800) made NVIDIA approve these cards for separate retail. But you must remember that there are still 6800 cards with 8 pipelines instead of 12

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Doesn't look too good.................. "defective" huh? well we know that now :(

Incidentally, nVidia don't sell these cards under their own name.......... they just supply the chipsets to OEMs

From what you say I don't think temperature is the issue..............try underclocking it.

EDIT: Regarding your question, you have not overclocked your CPU so there should be no effect at all on other components.

EDIT #2: OK I see what you have done, you have overclocked the BUS speed. I still don't see that this will affect the video card. AFAIK you have to clock that seperately?

Another experiment: try setting your system back to 133MHz and see if that makes a difference?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by vanman

Did this solve your problem?Does it fit exactly or did you have to make mods to the card?

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It solved my problem, card has been working perfectly since. Took me about an hour to put everything together (I did take my time on it). It was a Zalman passive cooler especially made for my type of card so it fitted perfectly. No modifications needed except removing the old heatsink/fan and cleaning the GPU (leftover 'old' thermal compound). Applied the supplied thermal compound and screwed everything together. There's only one drawback, the passive cooler does make the card a lot more bulky so there's no room anymore to use the PCI slot right next to my AGP slot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nihil

Another experiment: try setting your system back to 133MHz and see if that makes a difference?

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I tried it but still nothing..I decided to take it apart to see if there was anything out of the ordinary,but looks ok to me though..Two massive copper heatsinks on both sides,thermal paste and nothing that looks burned or anything like that.. Anyway thanks again for all the support guys..

By the way what is nv40?:confused:

Well, that would seem to confirm that your system clock speed isn't to blame, much as I expected.

You still might try underclocking the card from its current settings if that is possible?

Another thought would be to try the card in another machine, if you can?

I am afraid that the sudden arrival of this problem "out of the blue" suggests that something bad has probably happened to the card.

You might try downloading and running that testing application that I posted a link to.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by vanman

By the way what is nv40?:confused:

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It's an NVidia chip type. Every generation of cards has their own type chip.

Goodday ppl,
I tried to underclock the card like nihil suggested but still nothing.Well i have decided to let this one go because it seems like nothing is working and because of the fact that when i put my old card back it works fine..I guess i will have to start saving again for a new one.Any suggestions?Thx again guys..

Edit:I just read this article after doing a search on nv40 found here http://forums.techpowerup.com/archiv...hp/t-8706.html and thought you might be interested.Could it be the same thing?Especially the bios bits regarding the agp aperture size,and the agp 8x.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nihil

Another thought would be to try the card in another machine, if you can.

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And right you are..At last some good news..My card is OK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:drink: Sorry i could not resist that..I just don,t know why i haven,t tried it but i guess frustration and the idea of not having money to buy another contributes a lot..Just thought i would let you know..

cheers
vanman