NVidia GeForce 5500 FX

[heritagius]

Hi guys,

I was on a while ago going on about problems with a Sapphire Radeon x700 AGP card that froze my computer on boot-up and scrambled my display, and some kindly souls (Solocama, EXreaction, Njolakoski, duckhunter-deux, rjj7711) gave me some pointers to possible problems, i.e. power supply and disabling PCI simple comms. contollers.

Changing the power supply didnt work, nor did adjusting the comms controllers. I frustration I went and swapped the X700 for a PNY NVidia GeForce 5500FX 256MB card, and slammed that one in. It booted up fine, I installed drivers, rebooted, adjusted my display resolution, device manager says that it's working properly, then when I try and run a game, the screen either goes black with the game noises in the background or totally uniformly green (a rather nice mid-lime shade), with similar nosies in background to tell me the game is running nonetheless.

I'M GOING I.N.S.A.N.E. Can anyone shed some light on what this means? I thought I'd cracked it by switching from ATI to NVidia, at least I didn't get all the scrambling and power-offs like I did with the ATI card, only to have it fail at the last moment. I'm doing everything, completely re-installing Windows XP SP2, and only installing my internet connection before installing the card, but no joy.

The last thread for those deparate to read about the lame adventure with the previous x700 card is at RADEON x700 problems! Help!.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.....

Mark


I'll repeat my specs here:

MANUFACTURER/MODEL: Microstar (MSI) Model PCMT5
TYPE: ME MT 103
(system scan tool at www.crucial.com reveals mobo to be MS6507, specs at http://www.msicomputer.com/product/...6507-L&class=mb)
PRIMARY SLAVE: DVD Rom 16x IDE
SECONDARY SLAVE: CD Rom R/W ATAPI
VIDEO: VGA/EGA
DRIVE A: 3.5 Inch, 1.44 MB
DRIVE B: <none>
BIOS: 1.55 (04/24/2002)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz
FSB/MULTIPLICATOR: 100 Hz * 22.0
CACHE: 512K
SDRAM SLOT 0: 512 DDR PC2100
SDRAM SLOT 1: 256 DDR PC2100
FRONTSIDE BUS: 100 MHz
PSU: 250W max

Running Windows XP SP2

Other: BT Voyager 205 ADSL Modem, USB linked to comp, MITAC LC552 flatscreen, basic (supplied with comp) speakers, own power supply.

[DanU]

Which power supply did you try? Make/model/wattage?

[butch81385]

do you have any friends with similar computers where you can try swapping parts to see if it is a hardware malfunction somewhere besides the video card? maybe ram? (try running memtest86)

[heritagius]

PSU is FSP Group Fortron/Source 400W. Also had a 250 W same manufacturer.

I've run Everest to test the stability of each rail, they all hold steady around the 3.3/5/12V level with only .1V variance, so I doubt it's instability and with my setup 400W is certainly enough W to run the card (no extras except USB modem, have run one of those rough and ready power requirement calculators to estimate power being used, it's around 200W).

Haven't tried it in another computer (I only have one and I don't have many friends who have a desktop (they have friends ) - I'm going to try taking it home and trying it out on my bro's computer which is extremely similar in spec to mine, but seeing as it took him best part of a day to get his 9600XT going, he might not be my friend any more when I mess up his settings.... I've run Memtest (no errors) and Prime (no errors). I've updated chipset drivers, switched down to 2x with Riva, switched off fastwriting, pointed a fan at the card (although I didn't seriouslt think this'd help, it's not starting up let alone heating up), reinstalled XP and SP2 (nnnnngh painful), tried physical re-seating, dust-clearing, updated drivers, de-installed drivers again and used driver scrubbers on top of that before re-installing. Nothing. Nicht.

[Atomic Rooster]

Hmm... Maybe a bad AGP slot?

[cmptrgydv]

have you looked for a bios update,

[nwo75200]

RAM problems... perhaps.....?

I would try running just the 256mb stick and if that doesn't work, then try only the 512mb stick.

[FSUAgentSMITH]

The 5500 is a lower end card from Nvidia its processing speed is probably far slower than you would expect. I do not know much about ATI, but I can tell you that I have a few systems and one of my systems is much like yours and I have had the same problems with the 5500. The answer to problem is that the game you may be running needs a better card. As an experiment I changed my 6800 GT out of my number two computer and put in the 5500 to see what would happen if I ran the same game in my number two computer as in my other system which originally had the 5500 in it. In short the same thing ended up happening in both systems with almost identical set ups. The 5500 ended up being the problem and I believe its because of its processing power.

[andy1984]

Your probly not doing this and dont bite my head off for suggesting cus its usually the easy things that we take for granted that mess up things but

when you say installing the video card are you installing the drivers off the cd you got with it or the newest drivers from nvidias site?

[FSUAgentSMITH]

Quote:

Originally Posted by andy1984

Your probly not doing this and dont bite my head off for suggesting cus its usually the easy things that we take for granted that mess up things but

when you say installing the video card are you installing the drivers off the cd you got with it or the newest drivers from nvidias site?

What I did was take the card out of one computer and put it into another the proper way. Which means unistalling the drivers of the older video card, taking out the older video card, putting in the next video card, installing the drivers from the CD, and then looking for updates on the drivers. After this was done, the computer still crashed even though the system perfectly ran with the 6800 GT. I'm not the greatest linguist so if you have any questions just ask. Usually when somone gets confused with what I say I have probably worded it poorly. This is why I build computers and not write manuals on how to build computers. Thats somone elses job.