StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Has anyone had a computer error come up where a problem with your display occurs. Basically your screen gets broken up into vertical lines? The problem would come from the graphics card.

It doesn't all that serious. It happened on sunday after I had disassembled the fan on my graphics card to clean the fan as well as put a drop of oil in the mechanism (because the fan was having problems of an annoying sort). To fix the problem, I unplugged the card and plugged it back into the slot. It's worked normally since then, up until just a moment ago when the screen flicked and the vertical lines came back. I simply restarted my computer and it's back to normal.

So it's a problem that doesn't seem to be catastrophic, but on the other hand it's a problem I'm not sure of the cause or the solution. I haven't tested the card by playing a graphics intensive game. But normal displays are working normally.

just blow out the cartridge...
oh... videocard

Check connections, check temperature. make sure no oil leaked onto the board, and pray it wasn't ESD

ESD?

Stofsk wrote:ESD?

ElectroStatic Discharge

You zapped the card, basically. It = dead.

If it was that... it wouldn't be working at all though, right?

Stofsk wrote:If it was that... it wouldn't be working at all though, right?

It could be working, just not well. ESD is strange like that.

I tested it by loading up a couple of games. The card seems to be working fine.

Is there any way to test the hardware? Temperature, diagnostics, ESD?

There's essentially no way to test for ESD. It creates microscopic faults inside the ICs. Best to just stick it in, and hope it doesn't break. Make sure to ground yourself next time.

So it could be working perfectly for awhile up until one day things just go fucking pear-shaped and I'm down one expensive graphics card? Assuming this was ESD? (is there any other possibility?)