This video card is about 4-5 years old now and has developed a peculiar fault.

Most of the time it produces good pictures, including viewing JPG files and video streaming video. But occasionally, on system start-up, random multi-colour blocking and/or broken ranks of vertical lines appear. This occurs on the motherboard splash screen, various BIOS screens and Windows logo, This seems to disappear when Operating system desktop comes up.

I've also noticed, when i select 16 bit colour through the OS display settings, I get ranks of broken vertical lines down the display.

Also, where 3 D rendering is required in games the picture becomes intermittmently "Blocky and triangular" and occasionally I get the ranks of broken vertical lines.

For some reason video files stored on disk, when replayed, also occasionally exbit the broken vertical lines.

When any of these screen abberations occur no error or event messages are generated in the OS. Direct X diagnostics say everything is OK.

Thinking this may be a hardware problem, I took the card out and cleaned it off and re-inserted it, but the problem re-occurred. So I attempted to agitate the card in the slot when the problems occurred and found that this seemed to entirely cure the problem. In the event I narrowed the problem down to the additional 3 pin power supply lead which is affixed to this card. It appears that the surface mount for this connector has come loose and needs to be re-soldered.

Am I right in my conclusion or is what I'm witnessing something else ? If it is the connection, is it possible to re-solder this type of card without damaging other components ?

Nick

Solder it.....what have you got to lose. A capacitor came loose on an old card of mine years ago(geforce2 which caused random lines and stuff like yours). So I soldered it back down and I still use it daily on a machine in work.

I used a crappy £10 soldering iron as well (no thermal control or owt).

HTH

Sounds good to me.

As you say, there's nothing to lose. I have successfully re-soldered capacitors, and such like, on single layer boards in past. I was just a little concerned doing the same with multi-layered board and the possibility of consequential heat transfer blowing a circuit track elsewhere.

Luckily I've got an old (30 years) Solon type soldering iron, which when it dains to work, should do the job.

Nick

Took the card out again and thoroughly inspected it. What I thought was bad soldering was in fact the loose connector to surface mount. Adjusted the pin positions, which appeared to tighten that up, but video problems still with me.

I'm beginning to think that this may a power supply problem, as I'm now getting frequent BSODs. The power unit is now five years old - a Jeantech 500w AP.

The BIOS hardware monitor is showing the following under conditions with no apparent CPU activity:-

V. Core . . . . 1.376 - 1.392, constantly varying

3.3v . . . . . . 3.36v, stable

5v . . . . . . 5.080 - 5.107v, occasional variation

12v . . . . . . . .11.840v, stable

Both the variant voltages are outside the 3 % tolerance allowed by modern power supplies.

System is as follows:-

Motherboard is Asus AV8 - Deluxe, with 2 x 512 MB of Corsair 1 x DDR.

ATI Radeon AIW 9700

Floppy drive, 1 x Seagate 300GB SATA (x1), 1 x Sony DVD, 1 x HP lightscribe DVD

Last year I substituted a dual core AMD Athlon 64 for a single core Athlon 64 in the 939 socket

Is the observed voltage variation acceptable ?

Is 500W enough for this level of kit ?

Has the dual core processor tipped the power supply balance ?

Any views please.

Nick