Visiontek Geforce 2 GTS 64meg Problems

[TisBoyo]

I got a Geforce 2 GTS from my stepdad and when he had it, it worked fine. I put it in my computer and It would work for a little bit then started acting up, when I installed it, I got to play one game of Quake 3 and then afterwords my computer started acting funny. I have gotten the idea that the power supply isnt powerful enough, my system has a 200 watt powersupply in it, and i probably should upgrade it anyways, but would that cause the system to not want to load properly when it starts to load the GUI.


System specs
--------------
P3 1ghz
3 Ghz SDRam
Gigabyte 6vx7b-4x Motherboard
40 Gig hard drive
250 Internal Zip
LiteOn DVD-Burner
Generic DVD-Rom
3com NIC
Onboard sound (AC97)

 

[TwoEdge]

A new power source would be EXTREMELY advisable but you can also check if your video card fan is working correctly, overheating of the video card can degrade performance considerably and even (very possibly) damage it.

What is the rest of your system specs?

 

[dakota81]

You definately need a more powerful powersupply. If you check the manufacturers websites a lot of them do state the power usage of the drives; cd & dvd drives need 20 watts each, to spin up a harddrive takes about 20 watts. The P3 cpu will eat up somewhere around 50 watts. We're already up over 100 watts so far, and remember, most power supplies base their rating on the peak wattage it can supply, NOT continuous power. That PSU might be able to supply just 130 or 150 watts of steady output. And when a psu is overloaded, I believe the voltage it outputs will fall if it's a poorly built unit; well built ones I think will shut themselves down (I've done any testing of that to know for sure, obviously).

 

[TisBoyo]

Thanks alot for your replies, The video card is definitly not overheating, i can touch the heatsink/fan and it's not hot at all. The fan is working though. I didn't know about the PSU rating being a peak rating, that would explain why it worked for a little bit then went fubar. I have a 350 watt PSU that I bought for another system that definitly doesnt need that much power cause it's a p2 that just sits as a server. So I think i'll trade em out and see what I get. Thanks again, Ray.

 

[TisBoyo]

Ok, now i'm running into a new problem, the card is holding up better then before with the new PSU but now, for example, i ran 3dmarks2001se, after about the 6th or 7th test, it locked up. Shortly before it locked up, I used a laser temp to get the temperature from the chip on the video card, it was at 99, the fan is working fine, I would think that 99 would be an acceptable temperature, any clues?

XP Pro
Nvidia 53.03 Drivers
Bios is up to date on mobo.

 

[SYAR2003]

Tip for crashing video in windows/games!
Turn off fastwrites in bios if video card is unstable.
Increase AGP aperture size one step up.
Turn off video bios cachable
Turn off bios rom cachable.

syar