8800GT Faulty - Advice needed

[Silent Shark]

I've diagnosed a corrupted screen to the graphics card. I had a forum topic about it here:
http://forums.hexus.net/help-technic...ion-issue.html

Now that I'm pretty certain it's a hardware fault of the graphics card, I would like to get it replaced. Having brought things back to Scan in the past, I know that you test the faulty hardware before you accept it. Because my fault only appears in Vista, using nVidia drivers, are any of your test machines able to check this? I've only ever seen your machines running XP, but I haven't been in there recently...

If anyone could cast an opinion on the fault itself (i.e. cause, possible fixes etc.) that might help too.

Thanks.

[RabidDeathGnome]

If it's a hardware fault it will show up regardless of what other hardware/OS config you use.
Only reason it wouldn't show up was if it was to do with anouther peice of your hardware or nothing to do with the GFX.

[matty-hodgson]

yeah, it should be the same with any software.. are you sure it's not a driver problem? tried it in a 64/32 bit Vista? tried different drivers?

[Silent Shark]

Yes I've tried many different drivers.

The card has been put into a different computer. The machines share no other common components. One is an Intel machine, the other is an AMD. One has DDR2 RAM, the other DDR1. One is an nForce chipset, the other is an Intel chipset... etc. The fault occurs in both.

Yes, it is strange that it only occurs in Vista, and only when using the nVidia drivers, but there might be something fundamentally different with the driver architecture between the OSs that cause the problem to appear in Vista but not XP. It's not impossible or implausable.

I don't see the point in trying Vista 64 bit, because I don't use Vista 64 bit. I'm not really bothered if it's fine in 64bit, because it shouldn't be there in 32bit in the first place.

It hasn't always been present either. I've had this card for a couple of months and this is a recent thing. Before that I had another 8800GT for a few months and that was fine also.

Thanks for trying to help, but I've spent most of the last couple of days installing various operating systems and pulling computers apart, that I'm fed up with everything to do with them. Sorry if any of that came over as a little aggressive.

I guess I won't get an answer from Scan till tomorrow.

[RabidDeathGnome]

Does sound like hardware then tbh.

[Silent Shark]

Bumping in the hope it'll get noticed by someone from Scan.

Just a quick reply about if you can test it in Vista, that's all I need.

[Mick@SCAN]

Silent Shark,

We have a couple of Vista machines in our testing department so if the fault cannot be seen using our standard test benches we can certainly test the card under Vista.

[Silent Shark]

Good stuff. I'll be bringing it tomorrow .

[Silent Shark]

This is probably a bit too late in the day, but does anyone know what version of 3dmark Scan uses to test graphics cards? I want to see if the corruption affects that or if I'll have to take my own stuff with me to show them the problems.

I assume they still use 3dmark. Last time I had a graphics card tested it was a GeForce 4, so it's been a while!

Thanks.