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Please help me with a video card issue (April 2011) Now resolved

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cranioscopical:
Dear Aunt Agony,

Can someone be kind enough to give me a piece of information about hardware?

My wife's machine runs XP SP3.

The computer has an ASUS P5LD2 motherboard (ASUS P5LD2) with 2 Gig DDR2 memory. This board uses PCI Express X16 for video, and its video card died. The dead card was an Asus GeForce 7300 GS with 256 Meg DDR2 SDRAM. The machine died and then came up with vertical lines on the boot screen, a munged Windows start screen, and then failed… every time.

My extremely limited hardware know-how (more properly don't-know-how) does run to replacing a video card but I live in the middle of nowhere, so there's not much choice locally. Just about any video will do for this machine, however.

All I could get on short notice is a ZOTAC(?!?) GeForce GT 430. This has PCI Express 2.0 support and 1 Gig DDR3 SDRAM. So, that's what I bought.
I removed the old drivers, powered off and inserted the new card: machine came up perfectly well.
Installed the new drivers, rebooted: machine came up perfectly well.
Updated the drivers to the latest version, rebooted: machine came up perfectly well.

The trouble is that, once I start to access some software pffft, down it goes. With the new card installed the machine runs okay in safe mode with network support and, to my surprise, at 1600x1200.

So, before I start digging, can someone tell me if there is something inherently problematic, from a hardware point of view, about replacing this 256 Mb DDR2 card with a 1 Gb DDR3 card that has PCIE 2 and DX 11 support? Or, is it going to be driver conflicts etc… ?

Yours truly,

Lost, in Limbo

f0dder:
The GeForce 430 is probably (guesstimate, haven't looked at specs!) more power-hungry than the old card. Perhaps the PSU isn't delivering enough Watts, or is slightly flake and have voltages that drift too much? Could also be a motherboard problem, if it's voltage regulators are flunky; there's been known problems with too cheap capacitators on several motherboards.

nudone:
I've heard similar problems before and I think one answer was to check if you need an extra power cable to the card - because it's easy to overlook that kind of thing. I know I've done it.

f0dder:
I've heard similar problems before and I think one answer was to check if you need an extra power cable to the card - because it's easy to overlook that kind of thing. I know I've done it.-nudone (April 17, 2011, 09:06 AM)
--- End quote ---
Ah yeah, that would result in a very unstable machine - I thought later-gen cards all refuse to even start if the additional power cables haven't been installed. Some even come with buzzers so you get some very nifty/nasty audio warnings :)

nudone:
I've heard similar problems before and I think one answer was to check if you need an extra power cable to the card - because it's easy to overlook that kind of thing. I know I've done it.-nudone (April 17, 2011, 09:06 AM)
--- End quote ---
Ah yeah, that would result in a very unstable machine - I thought later-gen cards all refuse to even start if the additional power cables haven't been installed. Some even come with buzzers so you get some very nifty/nasty audio warnings :)
-f0dder (April 17, 2011, 09:08 AM)
--- End quote ---

Probably so. It's a long time since I dealt with any new hardware.

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