Bad card or bad driver? 7900

[memnoch_thedevil]

Hey gang...I just finished building my son's PC, and since I was at it, I decided to freshen up my daughters. I wiped the hard drive, reformatted, and installed a retail copy of Vista 32 bit...I then proceeded to download the latest driver for the card from NVIDIA, and installed them. Not soon after I got everything installed, the comp would crash. I was setting up admin, and my daughters account, and I got a lot of green wavy lines, and couldn't see the desktop or the os at all. I had to power down the PC, and reboot for it to get back into the OS, but at least it would go back in. It seemed ok for a while, then when I went to switch users, same thing happened.

I thought maybe the driver was no good, so I got driver sweeper, opened up the NVIDIA folder, then went into device manager and uninstalled the card, then after that deleted the NVIDIA folder, booted into safe mode, ran driver sweeper, rebooted again, reinstalled the drivers, and rebooted once again. I thought that had fixed it for sure, as it seemed there were no more problems. Then a couple of hours later, the monitor had gone to sleep, I woke it up, and same thing again.

I did install the same driver again, but I did a clean install of it, incase Vista had left any traces of the generic driver it isntalled.

I am going to try and find an older driver first, to see if I still have the same problems with that too.

I assume that the card is no longer warrantied, as it came in a built to order system from iBuypower, over a year ago.

Quick specs:

Asus A8n32-Sli Deluxe
Amd x2 4200+ 930 CPU
2GB Ram
EVGA 7900 GT
Vista Ultimate 32 bit

I just noticed the cook your card thread...any reason not to try this? I am beginning to think it is the card, when I rebooted into safe mode to clean the drivers, the screen had a yellow flash at the top for just a second, but it looked similar to the wavy green lines, just yellow.

Any chance of going through EVGA on this? They (iBuypower) had told me at the time, that the card comes with a "Life time waranty", but other than an invoice of the purchase, I some how doubt they would warranty a pre built system's card....

Thanks in advance for any info, and if you know where I can get reliable, legit older drivers to give those a test spin?

 

[kioras]

I would try EVGA first, and see what they can do, although they might say your stuck, without registering first when you recieved the computer.

 

[CruisD64]

You can try registering the card on their website to see if the warranty is still active. I'm not entirely sure but I believe you have to register the product with them within the first few months of owning the product for the warranty to apply..don't quote me though.

As far as your issues, it sounds like a defective card to me. BUT ... test whichever port you are not currently using whether it be the VGA or the DVI. You may be able to narrow it down to that even though it is unlikely. It simply doesn't seem like a driver issue to me. Anyways, good luck with the warranty!

 

[Technophobe]

Green wavy lines to me doesn't sound like a typical digital type problem. Don't video card problems usualy exhibit themselves as either BSOD, blank screen, weird shapes, lines or dots on the screen? I suppose anything is possible if its faulty, its just hard to picture the green wavy lines myself.

 

[memnoch_thedevil]

I'll take a picture of it...I was thinking driver issue simply because it was fine until I reformatted and put Vista on there...brb...

ok....best I could do, I suck with a camera lol...

All I have to do to get it to crash, is logoff or switch user...

 

[memnoch_thedevil]

nothing huh?

Anyone have some links to an older driver, instead of the 185.xx?