Graphical failure - Info Only

This is for informational purposes


so let's briefly explain what happened....

I started experiencing glitch graphics that kinda looked like someone had splashed paint all over my screen... I tried driver updates and the usual (virus malware scans ect) but no difference was made.

So I tried a fresh install but this still seemed to make no difference.

when I got this graphics glitch it wasn't just the graphics that went wrong since it seemed to also hang windows, forcing a manual reboot but with the same only to happen again on the next cold or warm boot.

It did puzzle me since it seemed only to happen with anything graphical i.e windows or the Bios splash screen but did not seem to glitch out on Bios boot text or even through the windows install screens....

I was quite stuck to as what the cause was, although I had the feeling my graphics card was failing.
I didn't have a spare to test and it was a late Saturday evening and had to wait until Monday morning for the stores to open..... (thank goodness i had my old Pentium 4 in the cupboard )

Well Monday morning arrived and with the frustration of having used my old P4 with its ultra slowness and block graphics from its old AGP ATI 9200SE I was very eager to dash off to the shops

So I headed off to the local PC repair shop armed with my trusty iPhone loaded with the pictures shown below to ask for their professional advice and low and behold it was confirmed..... my poor BFG 9800GX2 was on its death bed (tip always follow warranties, register and keep your receipts)

Now armed with my new and confirmed information I was happy enough to splash out on a new graphics card.....

back home i fitted my nice new shiny Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell GV-N98TSL-1GI - GIGABYTE - Product - Graphics Accelerator - Overview and as expected my PC was back up and running once again

I do hope that this information will be of help to many


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Good to hear mate.

Odd that you didn't experience any BIOS screen corruption though. The failing part of the card was only being taxed when in Windows I guess.

Thanks for the info.

I have to add now additional info:

As stated above i changed to a Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell..... yeah well all well and good but huummmppphhhhh just short of 2 month..... yes the Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell died a horrible death

well this one was slightly different in its dying hours....
after a night of watching a few videos and playing a few game i sent my sytem into sleep mode, next morning (more like afternoon, im lazy ) i came to wake up my system, did my daily wakeup brew ect and came back to find my pc on but no signal displayed upon my screen after several tests i found that DVi would not attempt to display anything, HDMI would display only the windows vista glob on boot and only an inch of screen set off to the for right of the monitor... same with AGP and and old AGP monitor, so yes the good old Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell was gone, confirmed by Tech support, the GPU no more

R.I.P Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell

well since the place i got it didn't have a replacement in stock i had to opt for an alternative replacement/exchange

Yay!!! Hello Zotac GeForce GTX 260² (that's amp2!) :D AMP! GeForce GTX 260² 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 (650MHz/2100MHz) [ZT-X26E3KD-FCP]

yay im so happy :D but sad at the same time, i do so miss the quietness of the old silent cell

ripbox said:

I have to add now additional info:

As stated above i changed to a Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell..... yeah well all well and good but huummmppphhhhh just short of 2 month..... yes the Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell died a horrible death

well this one was slightly different in its dying hours....
after a night of watching a few videos and playing a few game i sent my sytem into sleep mode, next morning (more like afternoon, im lazy ) i came to wake up my system, did my daily wakeup brew ect and came back to find my pc on but no signal displayed upon my screen after several tests i found that DVi would not attempt to display anything, HDMI would display only the windows vista glob on boot and only an inch of screen set off to the for right of the monitor... same with AGP and and old AGP monitor, so yes the good old Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell was gone, confirmed by Tech support, the GPU no more

R.I.P Gigabyte 9800GT Silent Cell

well since the place i got it didn't have a replacement in stock i had to opt for an alternative replacement/exchange

Yay!!! Hello Zotac GeForce GTX 260² (that's amp2!) :D AMP! GeForce GTX 260² 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 (650MHz/2100MHz) [ZT-X26E3KD-FCP]

yay im so happy :D but sad at the same time, i do so miss the quietness of the old silent cell

Click to expand...

ahhh, you gotta love the 260, brilliant card, so reliable, had no issues with mine, not sure about zotac tho, never used any of their hardware before, hows it running?

MrNeeds said:

ahhh, you gotta love the 260, brilliant card, so reliable, had no issues with mine, not sure about zotac tho, never used any of their hardware before, hows it running?

Click to expand...

Ummm yeah i wasnt too sure about ZOTAC but the tech repair guy assured they were a good make

seem to be a very solid and sturdy card, carrying the official Gforce logo.... think they get the Nvidia card and put their own logo on it and tweek it a but since it comes pre over clocked

Seems to be running (touch wood) very well.... did a few little tests with some games and seemed to get a good 95-160 FPS on high setting, could do with running some proper 3D mark benches though

Running 36 degrees idle and around 38- 42 full load which i think is quite good