Nvidia geforce 9500GT gone bad

[kellogs]

Hello,

I was looking to fix this board, used for regular desktop activities without an issue, max was a quake2-ish game that kept the board at 65 deg C. No fan attached to its radiator; I have had it for 2 - 3 years second hand.

Recently while switching between browser tabs in a Win 8.1 the dreaded "Display driver crashed but successfully recovered" message came on. Few minutes later it came on again, and again, etc until the PC halted.

- rebooting into Win 8.1 fails
- rebooting into Linux OK, but the graphics were mostly frozen
- rebooting into WinXP OK, working fine - BUT - no dedicated drivers for the card under this OS, just running it off the stock driver at low res.
- BIOS / GRUB / Win8.1 bootloaders running fine with the board.

Two of the electrolythic fat caps are swollen, but I don't think that's my issue. The rest of the parts are visually looking fine. Suspecting one of the RAM modules or the GPU. Thing is I have taken out the radiator and thus broken the conductive paste seal, so I couldn't easily put it back and run some RAM / GPU software tests.

My questions
1. Any software testing tool that might work on this graphics card ? It should also run from a boot disc or in WinXP
2. Any way to further investigate without re-applying conductive paste ?

Thank you!

 

[jaslion]

Hello,

I was looking to fix this board, used for regular desktop activities without an issue, max was a quake2-ish game that kept the board at 65 deg C. No fan attached to its radiator; I have had it for 2 - 3 years second hand.

Recently while switching between browser tabs in a Win 8.1 the dreaded "Display driver crashed but successfully recovered" message came on. Few minutes later it came on again, and again, etc until the PC halted.

- rebooting into Win 8.1 fails
- rebooting into Linux OK, but the graphics were mostly frozen
- rebooting into WinXP OK, working fine - BUT - no dedicated drivers for the card under this OS, just running it off the stock driver at low res.
- BIOS / GRUB / Win8.1 bootloaders running fine with the board.

Two of the electrolythic fat caps are swollen, but I don't think that's my issue. The rest of the parts are visually looking fine. Suspecting one of the RAM modules or the GPU. Thing is I have taken out the radiator and thus broken the conductive paste seal, so I couldn't easily put it back and run some RAM / GPU software tests.

My questions
1. Any software testing tool that might work on this graphics card ? It should also run from a boot disc or in WinXP
2. Any way to further investigate without re-applying conductive paste ?

Thank you!

Swollen caps = that a problem. Might not be the problem but it's still a problem.
I would just replace it with a new card. You can get many used cards that are quite a bit better than it for 30$ or the same one for 15$ but thats a pretty bad investment.

 

[hang-the-9]

There is no utility to tell you what part of the card is bad, just that the card is bad, which would be a benchmark like 3DMark or PassMark that stresses the card. As above, unless you are just wanting to play with the card and want to buy some parts, it would be much much easier to just replace that card.