I am wondering if anybody can help me troubleshoot a problem.
My home system has become unstable in 3D mode. In 2D mode, it works just fine. I have a dual boot vith Vista, and in Vista Aero interface (3D), it has become completely unusable.
The 3 possible causes that come to mind are:
1. power supply
2. graphics card itself
3. drivers
1. Power supply: is the biggest suspect, IMO. When I check voltages, just on BIOS screen, they are fairly steady and consistent at:
3.3V -> 3.18V
5.0V -> 4.78V
12.00V -> 11.84V
Is this enough to cause the instability? I suspect that under load, the voltages drop further...
2. Graphics card itself: Normally, I wouldn't suspect the graphics card, but some unusual things have started to happen. When the computer goes into graphics mode (3D), some lit pixels appear in places they should be black. Those are not dead monitor pixels, they appear randomly, and they don't appear when I go to command prompt and maximize (to get black screen)
3. Drivers: Even though nVidia has gone sharply downhill with quality of drivers, the problems happened with 6 different versions of drivers: 3 under 32 bit XP, 3 under 64 bit Vista.
I am leaning toward just buying replacing the Power Supply (I don't have a spare one at home to test). I wouldn't mind getting a new graphics card as well, but I am wondering, do PCI-Express 2.0 cards work in PCI-Express 1.0 mobos?
Joe |
