It is officially summer break for me! I finished up my last final yesterday and my fingers are crossed that my 4.0 gpa will escape this semester unscathed. I was really looking forward to enjoying the first day of summer yesterday when all of a sudden, while on my desktop, my computer froze up and weird pixels appeared on the screen. They were mostly blue and in a horizontal checkered pattern. I remained calm (mostly) and had to do a hard reset.  This happened to me the previous night as well … or something similar anyway. I was on a Fortress Siege – a really, really laggy one – and my computer locked up after the screen had weird artifacts and my audio was looping. I wasn’t too concerned about the initial lockup because I figured it was just the result of overheating or something.
Well, when I booted up my computer after yesterday’s first lockup I spent about five minutes browsing the internet and it locked up again. This time when I hard reset, all of the text and numbers you see while your computer boots up were gibberish, garbled, and resembled the matrix. Blue ribbons and wavy lines were everywhere and when my computer finally reached the desktop it was at a basic resolution and barely usable because of all the distortions.
My comp had 2 8800gt 512mb cards in SLI. I removed them one at a time and tested both of them to see if one had fried or something. Sure enough the primary card was toast but the second card works great. What a way to begin the first few hours of summer. I’m bummed that I don’t have two cards anymore, and I’m not really inclined to go out and buy another when I can just use one card for a while and then upgrade to a better card later. I tested my FPS in CoD4 and noticed I dropped from 91 constant frames to about 65-71 frames – huge drop there but not too noticeable.  TF2 runs the same. WAR runs the same (at least while running around IC). I’m hoping Aion runs as smooth as it did last test.
I hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come for the rest of summer.
Wrong perspective!
You should be happy – things like this can always happen and most people don’t have 2 Graphics-Cards in their gaming-rigs! 🙂
I can’t find a reason to be happy about a nice card frying. 😛 Relieved that I had a 2nd card to fall back on (at the cost of losing some performance in games) but not happy at all.
I’ve heard of this before and some folks were able to fix theres by taking off the fan and resetting the cooling fan (remove/reapply artic silver) on the card’s chip. Don’t know in your situation, but maybe something you can do on rainy day.
Any way you look at it, ANY time you have to mess with that junk it sucks.
I had a similar problem this month with both my GFX card and one of my RAM modules. After the initial periods of denial then acceptance/depression I found I replace and upgrade both items with far better (and actually cheaper) components.
There’s your (Arctic) Silver Lining for you 🙂
Sounds like an excuse for new video cards 🙂
That’s so weird. I was going strong in WAR a few months back when my computer did the EXACT same thing, same symptoms. It was also a fried video card with none to fall back on.
Good–it ended up with me buying a new computer, 2 screaming cards and the works.(son has old computer with a new card)
Bad–Fancy computer now has nothing to do since MMO-burn has me only playing the 360.
WAR must be workin those graphic cards overtime 8(
I understand how much of a bummer it is to be forced into a downgrade because something went kaput. =/
I’d stick with one card in the future, SLI rigs are always in danger of overheating and frying your cards and it’s not like you get double performance. Your odds are much better without stacking the most sensitive and heat-generating part of your PC.
The timing could have been worse, as it is prices just came down recently.
Well, my comp always had CRC faults while installing WOW and EVE — until exactly what you described happened. New graphics cards and those installation problems were gone. So it wasn’t the controller or the RAM, but in fact the graphics card! Who would have thought that would affect file operations?
I always totally stress out if even the slightest strange thing happens to my PC. Oh how I hate computers. I truly do.
So now you can blog your Aion Review?? YAY!
Let me guess… your card is only 1-3 months out of warranty too, right!? I hate when that happens! 🙁
I’d be curious to know how WAR runs in heavy RvR now. Even back in the days of beta I heard the game ran worse with two cards in SLI than it did on a single module. Hilariously, my friend with a GeForce 8600 512MB card ran WAR better than my 9800GTX 512MB.
5 gd days out of warranty.
You might be able to get the thing fixed/replaced under that warranty. Try asking nicely and explain that it had been behaving oddly before it died just outside of warranty. The worst that can happen is they refuse the claim.
god save us all from shuch day
Im sorry for your loss keen XD
Btw shit happens!
P.S. Aion rebiew ASAP please im looking foward that game!!!!!!
There is a hail marry fix for a bad video card. Take everything plastic off and bake in it a 400 degree oven for about 5 mins.
The gist is that your system is so powerful that it even works wonderfully with one graphics card.
I am sure there are some people out there who do not even have the power of the remaining graphics card at their disposal.
Still, I feel with you. A fried graphics card is not really making the day a happy day.
And… good MMOs are good by design, not by hardware requirement. Unfortunately, it seems that the next high hopes of the MMO player community are still in the making. Sigh.
I am going to play Mount & Blade till then. Or the latest Fallout 3 DLC, Broken Steel.
@Ripper
I told him to post his impression from the Chinese beta but he’s refuses.
🙁
okay okay, Chinese impressions are up.
You were in it for a bit, no reason you couldn’t talk about it.