I have a Leadtek / Nvidia PX 8600 GTS dual DVI card in an Acer Aspire T180 box which has an AMD Athlon-64 X2 4000+. I can give North/South bridge details if anyone thinks they need it.
Basically the system is fine, stable, no crashes - except when I run a 3D application like a game (usually RtCW:ET but any 3D game seems to do it, including the test application, under Vista, that came with the card).
Under Vista (32-bit Home Edition) and Linux (Ubuntu 64-bit 7.10, 8.04 and 8.10alpha) the behaviour is the same which strongly suggests that the problem is the hardware. But I can't work out why when it crashes and then reboots (forced or not), why after reboot it works fine and never crashes another time.
It doesn't matter if it's done immediately I start using the comp or after having it on for an hour or even a whole day, still the same - which suggests it's not a simple heating problem.
I've gone through several driver upgrades on both sides, now using the nvidia-glx-177 drivers under Ubuntu 8.10 alpha6 (and whatever the latest stable are on Vista).
I don't get anything extraordinary in my /var/log/xorg.0.log file but Vista sometimes gives a blue screen with BCCode 116 ("general video fault" from what I can tell). The appearance of the screen is always similar, it's the last screen with lots of short horizontal lines and the last sound clip will loop until reboot. In Linux I can do Alt-Sysrq-R -E -I to kill the X-session, or I can Ctrl-Alt-F1 and see the console, but it's messed up in same way that the X session is and isn't always responsive except to the Alt-Sysrq calls.
Like I said, on reboot it always works flawlessly and has never crashed a second time ... could the BIOS be changing the clocking or something?
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Just learnt about ntune elsewhere and am trying that. So far the graphics card has passed all the relevant tests and has been enabled for overclocking by about 15% without instability. Following running the ntune tests and tuning, which included at least 2 reboots, can't induce a crash in Vista - despite there not having been one yet.
errata: PX 7600 GT, not PX 8600GTS (oops!).
Will checkout RivaTuner when I get time, might be a couple of days now though.
Sorry not been back to accept on this .. the problem persists.
If I play a game in a reduced size window, or sometimes if its open in the background, then it may not crash (perhaps 1 in 4 for first case, 1 in 10 for second).
Using the nVidia tool - nTune, http://www.nvidia.com/obje
Still would like a fix, but am accepting that I won't find one in software and will just have to wait until I can buy a new graphics card.
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by: CallandorPosted on 2008-10-02 at 05:55:34ID: 22623679
If it crashes on both Vista and Linux, then it sounds like a hardware problem, as you have guessed. The occurrence only once might suggest something not set on the card after a cold boot, which I have seen on some cards (a power off is required to reset them). The fact that it only crashes with 3D games suggests it is something in the hardware that gets activated by heavy computations, perhaps a shader or texture processor. I think the card itself is faulty and you should replace it, as this is not normal behavior.