The toman diaries

A new graphics card

torsdag, februar 10, 2005

I just got a new graphics card for my PC. I initially ordered an Asus card with an nvidia mx4000 gpu and 128MB ram. It worked, but only for a few minutes at a time. It simply forze up my screen, couldn't move the mouse or use the keyboard. So I returned it and got a new one in a week. Same behaviour with that. - Frustrating

After exchanging some e-mails with PS Data, they agreed to send me an AOpen card with an nvidia FX5200 GPU on it, same amount of memory. This new card actually cost 100NOK more than the old one, but they actually proposed to sending it to me for no extra charge! Nice one :)

As you can imagine, since I'm actually writing this, the new card works, and it doens't hang for anything. The old one worked when I turned off agp acceleration completely in Linux (passing the option "nvagp" "0" to the nvidia driver via xorg.conf).

The only thing I'm having trouble with now is running the 3DMark 2001 benchmarks on it. Sometimes 3DMark itself hangs, sometimes I get the imfamous "infinite loop" BSOD.

The results I've gotten so far without any hanging is 2194 3D Marks with 2xAA on

I wonder if it might be the limited cooling these card have, both have no fan at all, but the heatsink on the FX 5200 card is about twice the size of the MX4000.