Anyone have any idea is to the lifespan of a gpu?

My Workstation/Desktop/Server, all have ATX boards with no onboard graphics. Server has a Geoforce 7300LE, Workstation a Geoforce 9500GT & Desktop a Geoforce 7100GS. All gpu's have 512mb memory. Asides from maintainence, all 3 rigs run 24/7.

Since yesterday, desktop's gpu has been playing up when rig has been running boinc & I'm also copying videos to hd. It displays the copying correctly, but there is coloured dots all over the screen. This happened earlier in the year on the desktop & replaced gpu. At 1st, thought it could be the fact that there is too much running for the gpu to cope with, so shut down boinc when copying video. However, it still does it.

Could it be that the card has insufficient ram to cope with that load? Or is it just on it's way out?

This is a weird problem. Swapped out al the gpu's. Put 9500GT in Workstation & on reboot, Vista forced into a re-activation. Put 8500GT into desktop & got nothing but BSOD - Memory_Management error. Shutdown desktop & put 8500GT in Andrea's. Reinstalled 7100GS in desktop & restored through WHS. So far, it's running normal.

I thought one had to make several upgrades before MS forces a re-activation? The gpu is only the 2nd upgrade since rig was built.

No activation still broken POS
did the samething to me when I tried a 9800GT
but I was able to switch CPU's and mobo's without activating

That's what surprised me. Whenever I build a rig, I keep a log of codes, both the installation & activation codes, so whenever I hit major problems, just reformat & reinstall (as long as no hardware has changed) & it's always worked.

As for the 7100GS, it started pixellating again, but not as bad as it was. going to get another gpu later today & if the same problem with BSOD happens, will just wipe the drive & reinstall. Personally, I think it's SP3 - have had nothing but problems since upgrading.

Bought another 9500GT as the pixellation was bugging me. Same problem, BSOD - Memory_Management. Then had a thought...could it be that my ECS mobo can only take PCI-E V1.0 & that the 9500GT is PCI-E V2.0?

Bios up to date. Can't think of anything else.

PCI-E v2 cards are supposed to work in v1 slots....

I would try updating chipset drivers and reseting the bios to all defaults.

Thanks Silk_311, all drivers up to date, will try resetting bios to default.

Already purchased another 9500GT & the same problem crops up on the XP X64 rig. Both 9500GT & 8500 cards work with no problems under Vista, which leads me to think it's an XP problem.

Just thought of another way......do a clean fresh install on a reformated drive, o/s, mobo drivers/gpu driver in that order. If it fails, I can just restore from server as if nothing had happened.

On the reinstall, I'm only going to install sp2 & then see if bsod crops up. If it doesn't then it's down to sp3. If it does then it has to be down to xp as used latest driver from Nvidia as well as the disk version. Yes I did uninstall driver before installing new driver.

Still having problems with the desktop & gpu. Stopped using it for video & installed the 2nd 9500GT on my X64 rig. It's been ok until now - got new BSOD. mismanaging System PTEs.

It has got to be the NVidia driver surely, as both the 9500's work flawlessy on the Vista rigs.

Got the desktop sorted (hopefully). Forced into a fresh clean install as numerous programs playing up. While hd was formatting in enclosure, stripped rig down for a full cleanup. Reset cmos, then installed XP Pro. mobo drivers,SP2 then graphics drivers & so far so good. Currently installing programs, then install sp3 & data files.

X64 rig will have to make do with onboard graphics as 8500GT now on desktop.

This problem is beginning to seriously bug me. Since doing a fresh clean install yesterday evening, I now have had 7 different BSOD's. Have only installed XP, MS Office, mobo drivers, gpu drivers, SP3 & IE7.

While accessing the forum only minutes ago on the desktop, got 0X0000008E error code. On checking out NVidia's forums, I saw that a lot of the problems with their drivers are caused by the PhysisX driver, so uninstalled that through add/remove programs.

From what I can see, the only option left is to purchase another 7300 & see if that clears the problem.

Has anyone else had problems with NVidia GPU's? Would an ATI GPU work properly on an NForce 4 chipset?

Make that 9 BSOD's. Transferred 7300LE to desktop & 7100GS512 to server. Having problems with getting driver for 2003, but if that fails, can leave it using Windows VGA drivers which is good enough for the server. Problem that I can't understand with that, is that it is not pixellating!!!

7300LE on desktop has had a further 2 BSOD's & cannot understand why this is happening now when the rig was operating practically 24/7 for the last 3 years.

As for both server & desktop not being able to run the 8500 or the 9500's, it could be that the mobo's are not up to it? Both are skt 939(Asus A8N SLI & ECS KN1 SLI Extreme).

Both boards do not have onboard graphics. I chose these boards because of their expansion capabilities & was informed that for server/workstation use, one should not get boards with onboard vga because of the performance - Is this true?

Absolutely weird!!!! just finished loading driver for server & testing with videos - ran settings of 1280x800 & ran a video as well, no problems & the amazing thing was NO pixellation - So conclusion is that it is a driver problem &/or mobo as all gpu's are working.

I did read about my Nvidia cards that onboard graphics do slow the card down, but a very very small amount due to the code to stop the onboard stuff.

Haven't had much experience with this particular card, but I've done lots of bug check analysis. If you want to find out which specific component driver is causing the issue look at the memory address provided in the 2nd parameter after the 0x8E (e.g. - 0x8E (0xWhatever, 0xTHISONE!, 0xWhatever, 0xWhatever)). Then run psat.exe (from the resource kit tools - win2k version here (works on 2k8 for sure) http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... /pstat.exe) to get your systems current memory allocation dump. Run it from a command prompt and pipe the data to a text file (e.g. pstat.exe > c:\psat.txt). At the bottom of the text file you'll see the memory address area like this:

ModuleName Load Addr Code Data Paged LinkDate
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ntoskrnl.exe 01C0C000 0 0 0
hal.dll 02124000 0 0 0
kdcom.dll 00601000 0 0 0
mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll 0060B000 0 0 0
PSHED.dll 00638000 0 0 0
CLFS.SYS 0064C000 0 0 0
CI.dll 006A9000 0 0 0
NDIS.SYS 00808000 0 0 0
msrpc.sys 00776000 0 0 0
NETIO.SYS 00A01000 0 0 0
etc...

This shows the memory start address of all the system drivers currently loaded on the system (i.e. if you're in safe mode or do any system changes (driver add/remove/disable) the pstat dump will change). Simply find the address immediately BELOW the memory address in the 2nd parameter. (e.g. if the address was 0x0060C801, the address immediately below that in the example above would be 0060B000 and would indicate an issue with mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll). This is of course assuming that your system boots up fine and then crashes sometime afterwards. If it bluescreens immediately on bootup, then you'll have to do the old "trial and error" approach of disabling/uninstalling specific drivers or get into stack tracing which I've never personally enjoyed (although I've had to do it in the past...yuck!).

I assume you've tried a few different BIOS revisions out on it - sometimes older BIOS versions are more stable for specific cards than the latest and greatest revision. There may also be some specific BIOS settings you could play around with as well, but since I'm not familiar with your MB I'll leave that to you to work out.

It really does sound like a bad driver issue - have you tried it with XPSP2? I've seen MS service packs "break" drivers when they "improve" application compatibility.

Since you seem to have things working now you might not want to bother exploring these options any further, but if you're a glutton for punishment and just like to "know" it'll give you some more options to play with.

I avoid onboard VGA for my personal systems as I've had issues in the past with performance and overheating. It also sucks that it "shares" system RAM (i.e. steals it for itself!). I do use them for my clients as long as they're not doing a lot of graphics intensive stuff (majority are corporate clients so we're just talking about word processing/email) and I haven't had too many issues with them. A few have crapped out in the past and I've thrown in old PCI VGA adaptors to get them by (almost impossible to find these days!).

Thanks User312. Hopefully, I've found the problem, which I just cannot understand as I've had no problems in the 4 years that the rig was running (3 of them 24/7).

The problem was the NForce Network Access Manager & since uninstalling that, have had no blue screen (up to 11 so far). Personally, I now believe that it was a Windows update that caused the problem in the 1st place.

At the moment, I'm finding WU is not very consistent - Just noticed a new program on my Vista start menu, Windows Journal, which, believe it or not, I like, & thought that it would be great on Andrea's rig as well (so she can log her food intake as for past several months, she has been experiencing migraine attacks), guess what, no Win Journal on hers & it's had no updates for over 10 days, whereas my vista rig has had 2 & currently has one waiting to be installed.

As for the desktop, I managed to track down NVidia's 175.19 driver which I know worked perfectly & so far, so good. As for the 7100GS card, it's working perfectly in the server.

The best thing to come from this problem was that both the desktop & server got a thorough spring clean, & boy, did they need it!

Edit: - Stupid me!!!! just found out why I've got Win Journal - attached graphics tablet recently.....DOH!!!!

Running continuiously for past 12 hours with no problems...Will wait another 12 before spending time restoring programs & files. All I can think of was an update clashed with NForce NAM.

Been running 24 hours & no problems

Another one for the old brain cells to ponder on.

Been running 51 hours continously with no further problems - Have reinstalled favourite programs & restored data - Again, no problems. Will just have to leave NForce NAM disabled.