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Okay. Long story short, I was using my normal setup after a fresh format and was minding my own business, and the computer was working fine--better than ever, in fact. Then, after letting the WoW login screen sit for a minute while I poured myself a drink, I turned back just in time to see the whole screen go absolutely ape**** with lines, wireframes, distortion, pixellated mess, and wildly fluctuating colors.
From there it only got worse. Reboots and VPU recover didn't help much at all, and the graphical corruption was every present--during windows, even during the DOS startup screens!!! In DOS while booting I saw equidistant pixel-ridden blocks that changed color as I moved my mouse, all about an inch to an inch and a half apart.
The computer seems to boot fine but I can't see ANYTHING on it, it is WAY too scrambled to do anything. I managed to install the latest catalyst drivers, even despite the awful distortion/pixelation, but it didn't help at all. Lowering my graphics card acceleration to none also didn't help (though it lessened slightly) and disabling/enabling fast writes didn't help either.
I opened up my computer and hooked up a second monitor; the problem is the same. So I am pretty certain it is the graphics card. It doesn't have its own onboard cooling or anything, it's an old school 9700 Pro, so maybe it is a heat issue. Anyhow I open up the case and see that a rainbow cable is attached to the power supply from the very corner of my graphics card (a rainbow cable is what we call those small multi-colored red yellow and blue wires that attach things like HDs to the power supply; they end in white blocks) .
I noticed it was attached pretty weakly to the graphics card, so I fiddled with it a bit and got the image to clear sporadically when I moved the connection (the white block) closer to the board.
It seems the culprit is a short in my card's connection to the power supply.
The primary part of the visual distortion seems to be an ever-changing series of 'DOS garbage bars'--they are the full length of the screen, and are almost constantly flickering with sporadically scrambled pixelated gray and purple mess.; they're also equidistant from one another, 4 inches or so between them each. The bars seem to always be uniform, but what they are made up of is constantly flickering and changing.
I know for sure it's not the monitor because I've tried another monitor that I know is fine, with the same results. I'm pretty sure it's the power supply connection but it might be something else.
Anyone ever dealt with this kind of thing before?! Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
...more importantly...I'd like to know what kind of ATI Radeon I should buy to replace it, if ol' Sally is dead for sure. I'm thinking x800, but I know little about them. I don't need top tier stuff but under 250 bucks is my current price range.
Also, I have to put a piece of crap Geforce4 440mx in the machine tonight, so my father can use it in the morning to do some annoying five minute login to work (I don't get out of work until 1am, it's an hour drive home, and then I have to be in work by 10am the next morning...and this ******* wants me to temp fix it and screw up my machine royally so he doesn't have to drive for ten minutes to work...bastard). My ATI drivers are still on there (catalyst 5.10's) -- will this affect the Geforce greatly? I just need generic capability for his login thing and then I can rip it out.
God damn what a lousy day this is turning out to be. Heh.
From there it only got worse. Reboots and VPU recover didn't help much at all, and the graphical corruption was every present--during windows, even during the DOS startup screens!!! In DOS while booting I saw equidistant pixel-ridden blocks that changed color as I moved my mouse, all about an inch to an inch and a half apart.
The computer seems to boot fine but I can't see ANYTHING on it, it is WAY too scrambled to do anything. I managed to install the latest catalyst drivers, even despite the awful distortion/pixelation, but it didn't help at all. Lowering my graphics card acceleration to none also didn't help (though it lessened slightly) and disabling/enabling fast writes didn't help either.
I opened up my computer and hooked up a second monitor; the problem is the same. So I am pretty certain it is the graphics card. It doesn't have its own onboard cooling or anything, it's an old school 9700 Pro, so maybe it is a heat issue. Anyhow I open up the case and see that a rainbow cable is attached to the power supply from the very corner of my graphics card (a rainbow cable is what we call those small multi-colored red yellow and blue wires that attach things like HDs to the power supply; they end in white blocks) .
I noticed it was attached pretty weakly to the graphics card, so I fiddled with it a bit and got the image to clear sporadically when I moved the connection (the white block) closer to the board.
It seems the culprit is a short in my card's connection to the power supply.
The primary part of the visual distortion seems to be an ever-changing series of 'DOS garbage bars'--they are the full length of the screen, and are almost constantly flickering with sporadically scrambled pixelated gray and purple mess.; they're also equidistant from one another, 4 inches or so between them each. The bars seem to always be uniform, but what they are made up of is constantly flickering and changing.
I know for sure it's not the monitor because I've tried another monitor that I know is fine, with the same results. I'm pretty sure it's the power supply connection but it might be something else.
Anyone ever dealt with this kind of thing before?! Any ideas or help would be appreciated.
...more importantly...I'd like to know what kind of ATI Radeon I should buy to replace it, if ol' Sally is dead for sure. I'm thinking x800, but I know little about them. I don't need top tier stuff but under 250 bucks is my current price range.
Also, I have to put a piece of crap Geforce4 440mx in the machine tonight, so my father can use it in the morning to do some annoying five minute login to work (I don't get out of work until 1am, it's an hour drive home, and then I have to be in work by 10am the next morning...and this ******* wants me to temp fix it and screw up my machine royally so he doesn't have to drive for ten minutes to work...bastard). My ATI drivers are still on there (catalyst 5.10's) -- will this affect the Geforce greatly? I just need generic capability for his login thing and then I can rip it out.
God damn what a lousy day this is turning out to be. Heh.