AGP 8x card running at 1.5v?

**CataclysmCow** · September 28th, 2003, 03:57 AM

My Winfast Geforce4 Ti4600 (a280) recently has started acting strange. During POST and in BIOS setup there are vertical blank lines and I often see old EGA style graphics artifacts while booting WinXPpro. After booting I'll get various problems like the screen freezing and my monitor clicking off and on (like the old monitors that would "degauss").

It started doing this about a month ago and it's gotten so bad I had to resort to using a back-up card. I've tried to figure out what's wrong with it and the only thing I can find that even though my motherboard says it supports AGP 8x it only can supply 1.5V and higher.

Is this what killed my vid card? Can a 8x card run at 1.5V? The temps seemed ok and it ran fine for about 4 months.

Also, why does my motherboard claim it supports 8x and yet only can supply 1.5V? There's also no mention of 8x in the BIOS. When I checked the card with the utility it did state that it was running at 8x and the 8x light was on.

Sorry for being so long winded. Hope someone can contribute some ideas.

VidCard- WinFast A280 GeForce4 Ti4600 8X

Mobo - BioStar M7VIK with v6.00PG BIOS update.

**NDC** · September 28th, 2003, 04:18 AM

Here's a link you might want to read up on replied by Peter M who is a BIOS engineer and is quite knowledgeable in this area...

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthre...hreadid=145110

and here is another link you may want to read..

http://www.ertyu.org/~steven_nikkel/...atibility.html

**NDC** · September 28th, 2003, 04:46 AM

Looking at the picture of your motherboard, it has the "Universal 1.5v AGP 3.0" which is capable of 1.5V and 0.8V.

I have AGP Pro50 slot on my Tyan S2668 motherboard which runs at 1.5V. So I'm assuming I can only use AGP Pro50 8x cards which run at 1.5V. not AGP 8x which is 0.8V.

This is my guess....

**CataclysmCow** · September 28th, 2003, 05:13 AM

Those links were very helpfull, NDC, thanks. I think I've now ruled out the whole 8X vs voltage thing.

I just tried to run the card again for the first time in a few weeks though. It did great... for about 5-10 minutes then it went back to it's normal self. I shut everything down and went to take the card out. It was BURNING hot!! The heatsink alone was almost too hot to touch.

So I found the cause of the problem then ... or at found a symptom of a problem that is causing this. I have no clue why it's running so hot. I'm going to start another thread with a more aptly named title ... see if I can get this one resolved.

**NDC** · September 28th, 2003, 05:23 AM

Is the fan spinning at normal speed?

As a matter of fact, I was getting some very unstable behavior in my system and found out later that that video card fan was barely spinning. I got a new heatsink and fan for the video card and all is ok now...

EDIT: My TI-4200 card runs VERY hot. I haven't seen many cards run this hot before...

**Xtreeme** · September 30th, 2003, 03:40 AM

All the Ti's run REAL hot. Lots of them die due only to heat stress. Reminds of the Voodoo3 3000 and 3500. The 3500 was agp (really pci-just needed agp VOLTS to run core higher)clocked just a smidge higher and for that need 4x the size HS than that of the same core V3 3000. LOL for a few mhz. That was one of the hottest cards in its day. Ive owned all the V3 versions and a couple of the LSI V2's.