[Novalug] Graphic card -Hardware weirdness

[Bonnie Dalzell]

Last night my display started having defects (initially small spots) in a 
checkerboard pattern on and off. I turned the thing off and restarted it 
and went to bed leaving it running because I was letting bittorrent seed 
a large file and I wanted to get to the 1:1 ration.

This morning the display had a whole lot of spots in a checkerboard 
pattern and seemed hung up so I turned the computer off, went to a 
different machine and googled "checkerboard graphics error" and got a 
useful page that suggested ways to distinguish between possible causes. I 
did the various diagnostic tests and based on the fact that the flash 
screen at boot was affected came to the conclusion that it was a graphic 
card error, not a driver or main memory error.

Well this is an older machine and it has an AGP Nvidia Ti 4 graphic card 
which is not easy to find right now. My local computer store, Cyber 
Guys had a supply of really inexpensive used AGP graphic cards so I went 
over and got a couple to try out.

Came back, turned on cold machine, still had checkerboard display error 
at flash screen.

Now I have a noisy case fan which would be noisy at boot up and then quit 
so since I had built the system with a lot of case fans, I had never 
bothered to figure out which one it was, but I decided, as long as I have 
the case open maybe I will figure out which case fan is bad before doing 
the graphic card replacement.

So I turned the machine off again and unpluged the most likely case fan 
and turned the machine back on and I had found the noisy case fan and 
the machine booted up quietly - AND no defective video display!!

It has been running for 40 minutes now and still seems OK.

Could the case fan have been a source of the error? A short in its 
armatures broad casting a signal to the video card? The silicone god 
messing with me? Etc.

Incidently if anyone out there has a nice working AGP VForce 4 Ti nvidia 
chip set video card they no longer need I am interested in buying it as a 
back up because these things are rare. My reserected card is a MSI 
Ti45600-TD8X although i would like to get the Ti4600-VT2D8X which has a TV 
video out/video in connector. The current card has only video out.


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                        Bonnie Dalzell, MA
mail:5100 Hydes Rd PO Box 60, Hydes,MD,USA 21082-0060|EMAIL:bdalzell at qis.net

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