Major problem with Gainward's Ti4400

[Feral_One]

About a month ago I built a new system: P4 2.0, Asus P4T533-C, 512 megs of rambus and a 300W Antec case (either SX830 or SX840, not 100% sure which). I didn't upgrade my graphics card then since I didn't want to drop the cash all at once. My OS is winXP pro.

Last week I ordered Gainward's Ti400. I got it today and have had nothing but problems. The desktop works fine, but whenever I attempt to run games I get blank textures, random lines on the screen and a host of other problems. If I don't exit out and reboot, I'll hang and get a forced reboot pretty soon after. Assuming I exit out the program back to the desktop I still get patches of colored squares forming all over the screen and can hang up under desktop mode after running a game.

I've tried the drivers that came with card, the 2.9.4.2 drivers from nVidia's site, adn the 2.9.8.0 drivers on Gainward's site. All are producing the same errors. My bios is the most current released by Asus.

Does anyone have any insight into this? I've looked at a few other posts on here and seen that power supplies are causing problems, is that's what is happening to me?

 

[cakecake]

"...whenever I attempt to run games I get blank textures, random lines on the screen and a host of other problems... I still get patches of colored squares forming all over the screen..."

Graphical errors like these are usually the result of your Ti4400 overheating, your power supply not delivering enough power, or the mainboard's power management being inadequate. Your mainboard is a pretty reliable one and as long as your GPU's fan still works it's probably not overheating.

It seems like it could be your power supply. 300W is supposed to be enough for that but some power supplies simply don't work while others do. You might try one thing though, before going out and buying a new PSU. Go to your BIOS settings and turn AGP aperture size down to 32MB, just to test it out. Then stress test your computer with graphics-heavy games for a long time and see if the problems still occur.

This little cathode light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!

 

[Feral_One]

Thanks for the suggestion. The card appears to be working now, though I haven't tested it rigourously. My main determination of "functionability" thus far has been running the 3D Mark demo as the video would begin to crap out on the 2nd or 3rd test.

I have the Asus probe installed on my comp and usually running. If the problem was with power supply, for which reading should I notice the drop?

The Vcore reading averages 1.552
the +3.3V reading averages 3.248
The +5V reading averages 4.972
and the +12V reading averages 11.977

The GPU fan is still working fine, I'vechecked it a few times. If the problem is overheating, I'll find out tonight. The room I have my comp in steadily heats up all day. I kinda don't think that heat is the problem as my mainboard and CPU temps never top 33 and 41 degrees respectively, even when under extreme loads.