Ok, heres the deal.. bought the card knowing it was having issues, so im not too stressed if i can't get it working okay. The next four paragraphs contain the troubleshooting the previous owner had completed and passed on to me.
"-- I purchased this board as part of an As-Is lot from another seller. Some of the boards work fine, but this one needs some help, even though it appears to be a new card.
I thought I found a couple of ‘cold’ (poor) solder joints on it and reflowed them the best I can. But it didn't help, and even if an intermittent solder joint is the problem (and I don’t know that it is), I have neither the proper equipment or the skill to fix it. So rather than really screw it up, I offer it for sale.
Tested in my K6-2/500 machine, it boots up fine initially, then as it ticks through the CMOS data, many characters end up in the wrong columns. This sometimes continues as you use the DOS command line to check file listings, etc., but sometimes it goes away for a while. When using DOS applications, like EDIT or XTREE, it usually does not malfunction for quite a while, if at all.
Booting to Win98 with the generic PCI VGA driver, Windows loads well but a few random off-color pixel clusters begin appearing in the background. And, this pixel confusion follows the cursor around, littering up the screen until some new dialog box, or other entity redraws that area. But if I try to use Nvidia drivers, it won’t boot up at all.--"
Okay, now with my setup, (Athlon 750 with the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset) i can boot fine (most of the time) into Windows 2k, still exhibiting the same VGA errors, using the 41.09 drivers. Once into windows, sometimes no problems for a while. Other times though, my screen will go off and back on like i changed the refresh rate or resolution. Sometimes will do it once, sometimes 5 times in 10 seconds. No pattern. If i try to run a D3D application, it starts off okay, but then much artifacts appear, and shortly thereafter it will freeze on the screen for a few seconds, before it resumes with the artifacts. This continues until I kill the application. From that point the desktop part of its operation is worse.
Now, i have checked the board quite throughly and it appears to be in mint condition, no overt problems at least. The heatsink on the GPU appears to not be seating as firmly as I'd like, and i plan to correct that ASAP. That however should not be the problem, due to the issues sometimes occuring right at start up. I flashed the BIOS of the card, which has seemed to help it somewhat, but it still exhibits the same problems, only less frequently now.
Anyway, any input would be appreciated. This is the first Vid card i've troubleshooted outside of your normal driver/software problems you get with any card, so im a novice at it.
Thanks for reading
"-- I purchased this board as part of an As-Is lot from another seller. Some of the boards work fine, but this one needs some help, even though it appears to be a new card.
I thought I found a couple of ‘cold’ (poor) solder joints on it and reflowed them the best I can. But it didn't help, and even if an intermittent solder joint is the problem (and I don’t know that it is), I have neither the proper equipment or the skill to fix it. So rather than really screw it up, I offer it for sale.
Tested in my K6-2/500 machine, it boots up fine initially, then as it ticks through the CMOS data, many characters end up in the wrong columns. This sometimes continues as you use the DOS command line to check file listings, etc., but sometimes it goes away for a while. When using DOS applications, like EDIT or XTREE, it usually does not malfunction for quite a while, if at all.
Booting to Win98 with the generic PCI VGA driver, Windows loads well but a few random off-color pixel clusters begin appearing in the background. And, this pixel confusion follows the cursor around, littering up the screen until some new dialog box, or other entity redraws that area. But if I try to use Nvidia drivers, it won’t boot up at all.--"
Okay, now with my setup, (Athlon 750 with the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset) i can boot fine (most of the time) into Windows 2k, still exhibiting the same VGA errors, using the 41.09 drivers. Once into windows, sometimes no problems for a while. Other times though, my screen will go off and back on like i changed the refresh rate or resolution. Sometimes will do it once, sometimes 5 times in 10 seconds. No pattern. If i try to run a D3D application, it starts off okay, but then much artifacts appear, and shortly thereafter it will freeze on the screen for a few seconds, before it resumes with the artifacts. This continues until I kill the application. From that point the desktop part of its operation is worse.
Now, i have checked the board quite throughly and it appears to be in mint condition, no overt problems at least. The heatsink on the GPU appears to not be seating as firmly as I'd like, and i plan to correct that ASAP. That however should not be the problem, due to the issues sometimes occuring right at start up. I flashed the BIOS of the card, which has seemed to help it somewhat, but it still exhibits the same problems, only less frequently now.
Anyway, any input would be appreciated. This is the first Vid card i've troubleshooted outside of your normal driver/software problems you get with any card, so im a novice at it.
Thanks for reading