Urgent: graphics card problem in my AM2+ PC
Hello everyone,
I am currently having problems with my AM2+ PC (see specs below):
This is what it looks like in the screen shot posted below:
As you can see, there are vertical lines in the screenshot (about half the screen is like that), but the other half is normal.
I recently replaced the old OEM heat sink and fan since the OEM one had severely bad bearings.
Heck, my old Xbox 360 broke, and you guessed it: a bad graphics card (GPU went south, same for my desktop's card, but still operates, with missing or bad characters on-screen.)
If only I knew where the old ATI Radeon 9600 PCI-E video card is in my house, I would install it.
Is there an easier way to fix this graphics card? I'm out of money and graphics cards aren't that cheap somewhat, depending if they are high-profile or low-profile. Usually low-profile ones are cheap while high-profile has a better heat sink.
I am currently having problems with my AM2+ PC (see specs below):
AMD Athlon X2 64 Dual-Core Processor 4000+ 4.22GHz (2.11GHz/core) 4GB DDR2-800 Microsoft USB Wheel Optical Mouse ECS nForce6m-a v3.0 Motherboard (NVidia Chipsets) RealTek RTL8111B PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet (on-board) 6x USB 2.0 High-Speed 480Mbps ports 2x RealTek RTL8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Cards (for pfSense Virtual Boxes, FreeNAS, and a network for my Xbox 360, laptop, server itself, and old PC) IDT HD Audio w/ Integrated RealTek AC'97 front-end audio NVidia E-GeForce 8500 GT 512MB VRAM PCI-E x16 Video Card w/ a new heat sink and fan, with RAM heat sinks installed (broken) Hitachi 60GB 2.5" Hard Drive (pulled out of my old Xbox 360 since it died) HP PSC 750 Printer HP DeskJet F4135 Printer Inland 1.44MB 3.5" FDD Antec 900 case LG DVD Burner with burning utilities and software Antec 650W ATX PSU Seagate 1TB HDD for backups, FTP, and more storage (made as an external) Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition SP2I've had my graphics card for 5 years and decided to quit working properly. For example: I cannot up the screen resolution or color depth from 640x480@4-bit to 800x600@32-bit. However, the color depth does change to 32-bit after forcing the apply button and system restart, but applying a higher screen resolution causes the depth to go back to 4-bit and the resolution is still at 640x480.
This is what it looks like in the screen shot posted below:
As you can see, there are vertical lines in the screenshot (about half the screen is like that), but the other half is normal.
I recently replaced the old OEM heat sink and fan since the OEM one had severely bad bearings.
Heck, my old Xbox 360 broke, and you guessed it: a bad graphics card (GPU went south, same for my desktop's card, but still operates, with missing or bad characters on-screen.)
If only I knew where the old ATI Radeon 9600 PCI-E video card is in my house, I would install it.
Is there an easier way to fix this graphics card? I'm out of money and graphics cards aren't that cheap somewhat, depending if they are high-profile or low-profile. Usually low-profile ones are cheap while high-profile has a better heat sink.
Comments
A trip into the oven is most likely required or use a heat gun. There are plenty of videos on youtube showing varying methods.
Yes, you can get a budget card that will eat you 8000 series for lunch. An entry level 500 or 600 series card will do fine. I have an AM2+ system (but with a Phenom X4 9850) has a EVGA GTX 550Ti with 2 GB that I picked up for less than $150 a year ago; it'll run Star Trek Online, BioShock-2 and The Sims 3 all at 1920x1080 with the high settings, no sweat. The twin 7950's that I did have before that were having heat related problems also; the 550 blows their doors off. And it's cooler, quieter, and uses less power.
I'd also like to note:
That's not 4.2GHz just because you have two cores. It's still a 2.1ghz CPU, you're not exactly getting double the performance over a single core. The OS running on the machine needs to be SMP aware and the applications you run need to be designed in a way to offload work onto helper threads/processes in order to take advantage of multiple cores. Many games for example, such as Borderlands 2, are single threaded, so the game will only do CPU operations entirely on a single core. None of the other cores will do anything to help out the game speed and this is by far not the only game like this, in fact, the vast majority of them are.