Video card dead? What do you think?

T

Triptoph333

n00b
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Apr 23, 2009
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When I boot up, during POST I can see vertical dotted lines of colours, during Vista's boot screens i see thick vertical bands of blue, and when Vista attempts to load my monitor's native res of 2560x1600 I get nothing but a black screen.

Video card dead right?

When I start up in safe mode at 1600x1200 which uses the default video driver, everything looks fine... once you get to windows.

This started after I uninstalled and cleaned all versions of the .Net framework from my system (in an attempt to fix the problem where a windows update for .net 3.5 would fail repeatedly). I've uninstalled and reinstalled nVidia's latest drivers for my 8800GTS.

Really don't want to buy a new video card as that one did all I needed, but if I have to I want to get some other opinions first. It's because of those lines during POST that makes me think Video card is shot, probably overheated memory and it was just coincidence that it happened when uninstalling... ?
 
Well... you can't really rule out that something in the Windows install got screwed up when you were mucking with the .net stuff. That's too much of a coincidence for me.

What I would do first is to run Memtest86+ to see if it reports bad RAM (which can cause all kinds of odd misbehavior, possibly including the problems you were trying to solve in the first place), then do a complete reinstall of Windows (I hate to recommend that much work but I see no other way).
 
Thanks for the reply. I wonder if I damaged the video card drivers, whether it would be possible for them to cause physical damage to the video card by communicating with it poorly.

In any case, I ran to the store and grabbed a replacement video card... a gtx 260, and after rearranging cables, removing a hard drive, a hard drive cage, replacing cables with right-angle cables so that this BEAST of a video card could even fit into there, I can report at least that the computer now POSTs with no vertical banding. It's now working on installing drivers for all the hard drives i just rearranged to fit the card in.
 
Triptoph333 said:
Thanks for the reply. I wonder if I damaged the video card drivers, whether it would be possible for them to cause physical damage to the video card by communicating with it poorly.
Click to expand...

Highly unlikely. I don't think the video card's BIOS would allow system drivers to damage it.
 
A similar thing happened to me recently

I ended up replacing my 8800gts with a gtx275 and everything seems fine. Except for L4D, which BSODs or the video drivers stop responding.
 
After installing the nVidia drivers, everything has been smooth. Loving the new card, price was pretty sweet to for a pretty decent upgrade.
 
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