Graphics card woes..

Wow. It's been a long time since I've updated my blog. I've been busy fixing my computer the past few weeks. Here's the story:

It all started after I sold off my reliable nVidia 6600GT. On the 10th of May, I've got myself an outdated but still very good graphics card, the model is a nVidia 7900GS 256MB DDR3 to seek for better performance in my favourite games. It was an OEM version, but it was branded by Colorful. I got the card from a user from a forum that I always visit, Lowyat.net. The seller was quite friendly and I actually FFKed him because I couldn't wake up! He told me that he waited for an hour. I feel bad so I agreed to pay him RM5 to cover his transportation fees. So I called him and asked when to COD again and he told me to get the card from him in Lowyat Plaza. So that's what I did and I went to Lowyat Plaza and paid RM215 to him.

So I went home, plugged the card in, and hoping that everything will work.

After setting everything up, it was time to test the performance out with my favourite games such as Counter Strike Source and Warcraft III. To my surprise, they didn't work as I expected. There were screen corruption/artifacts/pixelization everywhere. So I contacted back the seller and asked for a refund. He said he couldn't do it because the card was working fine before he sold it off to me. So I suspect it was my motherboard that is incompatible with the card.

I got so fed up and contacted the guy again after tons of installing and uninstalling drivers and Windows XP reformatting. I think I did about 10 or 20 times of reformatting! Woot? So I contacted him and he asked me to seek for his friend, which was a distributor for computer parts to help me test out the card. So I did bring the card to his friend, and his friend told me that the card was working perfectly!? What could be wrong?! 99% of possibilty that my motherboard doesn't support the memory bandwidth of the card because my crappy the PCIe slot is just a PCIe 4x Lane slot which couldn't support high bandwidth cards? Or it was just that the 7900GS sucked too much power that my motherboard become unstable or etc.? I couldn't tell.

I decided to sell it online and so I did. I sold to a nice person which lives in Penang for an amount of RM210. RM5 loss. Not too bad.

On the 9th of June, my girlfriend bought a Galaxy 8600GT 256MB DDR3 version for me. I got this card because it didn't require additional power connectors and it runs faster than the outdated 7900GS without the extra power. So I tested the card and to my surprise again, there were still corruptions everywhere. So at this point, I know that my motherboard is absolutely incompatible with the new cards.

I've decided to go back to the shop and exchange it for other graphics card. Despite not much choice, I've decided to go for a Sapphire Radeon HD3650 which was at the same price. RM250. So I got back home and tried the newly bought card. It didn't boot at the first time, I got so sad and fed up. So I decided to return it.

My girlfriend, asked to try it one more time. And this time, it worked! My PC POSTed, or booted up! So I got excited and reformat my computer and installed all the necessary drivers. It was a lot worse than the 8600GT that I previously owned. Though it was better than the 7900gs, where there were no corruptions while playing Warcraft III, this time there were some corruptions on the desktop! There were little dots running all over my desktop and I just couldn't fix it! It's just so sad.

As I write this post, the HD3650 is still running in my PC, waiting to be sold anytime, while hoping that miracles would happen and problems will just fade away.

I've learnt my lessons, I regret that I sold off my 6600GT. I was greedy. But nonetheless, it is almost time to say goodbye to my trusted motherboard. But until I save enough money, this motherboard that accompanied me the last 2 years will keep on serving me until the time finally arrives.

Warning: For those budget PC buyers, do not ever get a VIA chipset motherboards which sucks big time! The support team is worse.