AB9 Pro problems - fried?

[patrick.gill]

Hello everyone. My motherboard appears to have been fried. My setup:

Case: 450W PSU with additional case fan
MB: Abit AB9 Pro
CPU: Intel E6850 (Core 2 Duo @ 3GHz)
RAM: 2 x DDR2 1GB 800 MHz
GFX: Gainward GeForce 8600GT 512MB
HD: WD Caviar 250GB SATA II 7200
Optical: Samsung 20x SATA DVD-RW
Monitors: Dual Monitor setup - Asus 22" + AOC 17"
USB: Scanner, VOIP phone
PS2 mouse + keyboard

The story - I got all components 15 months ago. I had some initial problems with the FW that came on the AB9 Pro, but once I updated it it all seemed to be good. About 2 weeks ago I got the Asus monitor and set it up as the primary display via DVI, and kept the AOC on RGB as a secondary display. So far so good.

I decided the best way to test my new monitor was to play a game, namely GTA IV. Since my new monitor is a widescreen, I had to modify the resolution. I found that I needed a higher resolution for display on the new monitor, and the game suffered some performance issues.

Yesterday, I decided to check for new drivers for my GFX as I know there have been some serious issues getting GTA IV to run smoothly, and drivers keep getting updated. I downloaded and installed the latest nVidia drivers for my card (v. 181.20) and started the game. I'd been playing for about 90 seconds (much better performance with the new drivers) when the screen went black, and the computer restarted. It tried restarting about 9 times in a row, but would die (with a horrible moaning sound) every time. I unplugged the computer. The first thing I thought was there might have been a power surge, but I'm using a surge protection extension for all my computer stuff, and there was no other indication that there had been one. In case it was simple overheating (unlikely after 90 seconds of play, but still...) I left it for a couple of hours. When I came back I unplugged all peripherals and left only the primary display, mouse and keyboard plugged in, and started up the computer. It got as far as the BIOS splash screen, then artifacts appeared and it hung. I tried plugging in the secondary display on its own, and in combination with the primary, but I still didn't manage to get past either a black screen, or a corrupted splash screen. I've gotten all sorts of POST codes:

C5 - this is the code I get most often, the description says "Call chipset hook to copy BIOS back to E000 & F000 shadow RAM"

Whenever it actually manages to get past C5, I can get any of the following:

03 - "Initial Superio_Early_Init switch"

10 - "Auto detect flash type to load appropriate flash R/W codes into the runtime area in F000 for ESCD & DMI support"

25 - "Early PCI Initialization:
- Enumerate PCI bus number
- Assign memory & I/O resource
- Search for a valid VGA device & VGA BIOS, and put it into C000:0"

52 - Test all memory (clear all extended memory to 0"

FF - "Boot attempt (INT 19h)"

Now for my questions:

1. Is this likely to have been caused in any way by the new drivers for the GFX or is that a complete coincidence?

2. What is likely to be the issue here? The motherboard, the GFX, the memory? Or could it be more than one component?

Thank you in advance for any responses, as I've never had anything like this happen to me before.

Regards,

Patrick

[BUFF]

if artefacts are appearing in the BIOS pages that is befor any drivers are called for so it's not the gfx drivers.
tbh my first thoughts would be a faulty gfx card.

which exact PSU & which exact RAM?

[DratUK]

As BUFF, if your getting corrupted graphics at boot it points to the Graphics card VRAM dying. GTA IV is fairly graphics intensive and therefore puts a high load on the graphics memory.

I have had this happen a couple of times to me and its been the video card. An outside possibility is the PSU but if you can post the manufacturer and model we can look at the 12v+ line to see if its adequate as that will be stressed as well.

[Reapsy]

I've read about dodgy soldering on some of Nvidia's GPU's

[patrick.gill]

BUFF and DratUK, thanks for your replies.

BUFF, I realise it's not the drivers causing the problem, what I wandered was whether the new drivers could have caused the hardware failure by overloading the card.

DratUK and BUFF, I believe the RAM is Kingston standard 1GB 800 MHz DDR2 sticks, no idea what manufacturer/model the PSU is. I will take a look when I'm back and post back. Thanks to both of you.

Reapsy, I don't believe that answers either of my questions, and I'm not really looking for anecdotal evidence on nVidia's product quality (I've been using nVidia for close to 10 years now, and they've never given me any reason to complain). But thanks for your input.

[patrick.gill]

To confirm:

PSU - Win Power ATX-450
RAM - I now think this may be generic, PC2 6400U

[DratUK]

To confirm:

PSU - Win Power ATX-450
RAM - I now think this may be generic, PC2 6400U

That helps a huge amount

K you have 17 amps on the 12 volt line
http://www.power-win.com/en/p/43-swi...er_supply.html Your PSU.

You have an overclocked CPU that will increase the power draw on the system as a whole so I think your on the edge of the PSU being stressed.

K here's what I think, and this is guess work so don't take this as gospel as I dont want you lashing out cash.
The PSU had a fit due to the additional draw running your system OC and then with the additional stress onto the vid card. I have a had a PSU start to die and caused graphics problems, replaced PSU problem went away. so thats one scenario.
Second scenario is the graphics card is dying that could be a as a result of the PSU supplying insufficient power during high loads. 17 amps is not a lot to play with albeit it can draw 204 watts on the 12 volt rail.

If you can swap out the PSU with another if a mate has a spare or can borrow. If that dosent clear up the issue then the same thing with the video card, swap out and try.

I would certainly look for a better quality PSU anyway something along the Corsair VX line or the Silver Power or Silverstone units.

[patrick.gill]

Thanks for your reply.

Just one thing, I haven't overclocked the CPU.

I suspect the second scenario is the more likely one, but I did want to replace the PSU at some point anyway. Unfortunately I have no hardware immediately available for swapping (especially GFX) so I may have to get the hardware tested to identify which part I should replace.

Still a little suspicious of the video card failing immediately after updating the drivers, so may contact Gainward first...

Will keep you posted.

[DratUK]

Yep keep us posted.
Saw the @3.0Ghz and brain said OC

[patrick.gill]

Just thought I'd mention I mistyped the driver version I installed, it's 181.20 and not 180.21 as I originally wrote. I've edited my post to correct it. I'm seeing a lot of people with problems with the 181.20 drivers...

[Reapsy]

BUFF and DratUK, thanks for your replies.
Reapsy, I don't believe that answers either of my questions, and I'm not really looking for anecdotal evidence on nVidia's product quality (I've been using nVidia for close to 10 years now, and they've never given me any reason to complain). But thanks for your input.

Well I believe DratUK has answered your question, your graphics card is faulty.

[patrick.gill]

An update on what's going on so far.

Since the card is supposed to have a 3 year warranty, I visited the Gainward site for information on RMA returns. The site pointed to a page (http://www.gainward.com/main/support_detail.php?id=9) with details on RMA returns.

The information provided there also gave me an e-mail address to contact Gainward regarding technical support (support@gainward.de). I contacted Gainward via e-mail on Monday to try and answer my questions. Having received no response or acknowledgement of receipt by Wednesday, I visited the Gainward website to get some other contact details. The contact page (http://www.gainward.com/main/contact.php) gave me three other contact addresses for technical support. I e-mailed all three with the same queries. Again, I received no response or acknowledgement of receipt. On Thursday (yesterday) I therefore tried to get an RMA number to return the card instead of waiting for a technical support response, again via e-mail (to rma@gainward.de).

Today I still hadn't received any response or acknowledgement of receipt to any of my e-mails, so I decided to enable "return receipts" on a final e-mail to all the addresses (plus one more I'd found while googling) with my queries, and the information on my system. Unbelievably, I received a read receipt from three of the e-mail addresses (rma@gainward.de, support@gainward.de and ronny@gainward.de) within 15 minutes of sending the e-mail. Clearly, they are simply ignoring my requests for support and RMA.

I sent one more e-mail, informing them they were in breach of the European Union Product Warranty Directive, and a failure to respond would result in me taking legal action, and voila, they decided to respond. However, it has quite possibly been the most useless response I have ever seen:

Hii,,


The graphics card 8600GT does not support latest drivers from NVIDIA.
The 180 series drivers from NVIDIA are specially designed form 9000
Series graphics card.

Please uninstall your previous drivers and install the drivers from the
CD provided along with graphics card or your can download 163.75 series
drives from below link.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_163.75.html.

Use Nvidia control panel to configure your second monitor.

Best Regards
Technical Support
Gainward Europe

Obviously, I've replied to them to let them know that they may want to read the support requests before responding, and that according to the nVidia site the drivers are valid for the 8600 GT chipset (see http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/winxp...0_whql_uk.html, under "Products Supported").

Anyway, I did some searching on the Internet and found that the first page I visited (and which is even now a valid page) is incorrect. Gainward will apparently not service RMA requests when they come directly from the customer. They must go through their resellers or distributors (see http://www.gainward.com/support/docs...n_20051007.pdf {PDF}), although this is not made clear on the RMA procedure page, and it still doesn't imply that support requests must go through the ditributor.

So I have now contacted the shop I bought it from to see what they can do, but worringly enough they no longer sell Gainward products...

After such an ordeal I would strongly recommend not buying Gainward products.

[Reapsy]

I wouldn't be so quick to lay all the blame at gainwards door, I suspect they have been screwed over by nvidia along with the rest of nvidia's partners due to the large number of defective chips.

Here's some links

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...hips-defective
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ledgebase-g92s
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-bump-material
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...rfill-problems

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvi...lure,6248.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-failures.html
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39687/135/

Now I know the INQ is heavily biased against nvidia and I have owned a nvidia card from every generation except 7 and only had 1 card I had to RMA but it does seem like theres something to it too me.

[patrick.gill]

I wouldn't be so quick to lay all the blame at gainwards door, I suspect they have been screwed over by nvidia along with the rest of nvidia's partners due to the large number of defective chips.

Here's some links

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...hips-defective
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ledgebase-g92s
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...-bump-material
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...rfill-problems

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvi...lure,6248.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-failures.html
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39687/135/

Now I know the INQ is heavily biased against nvidia and I have owned a nvidia card from every generation except 7 and only had 1 card I had to RMA but it does seem like theres something to it too me.

Christ on a bike. Yeah, I'm sure that Gainward's lack of support is all to do with nVidia - clearly they have instructed Gainward not to respond to their customers. Can you please go "help" someone else?

[Reapsy]

Who said anything about Nvidia instructing Gainward not give support? The point I was trying to make was that Nvidia resellers are seeing a 14% failure rate on Nvidia cards which is pretty high and will likely stretch there support services.

[patrick.gill]

Who said anything about Nvidia instructing Gainward not give support?

Christ, you don't understand sarcasm either? Please, please, please, go troll another thread.