Geforce 6800 Ultra

[KARL]

Does anyone have experience of this graphics card ? I bought one for my son but it has never worked properly. It was sent back for tests but we were told they could find nothing wrong with it. We have used it with several processor and motherboard combinations and sometimes been unable to get it to work at all. Our latest findings indicate that just possibly it has an intermittent fault rather than a constant and uniform malfunction characteristic. This is not a cheap bauble so we are seriously disgruntled. News of any problems experienced by others would be of interest, together with details of successful solutions used.

[Potatoman]

Make sure you have the LATEST drivers from Nvidia - The latest one will support it, but earlier ones dont. So, if you use the default windows driver (which is pants anyway), it wont work.

[Gandy]

What problems are you having?

[KARL]

In the current setup the card functions correctly most of the time but occasionally the computer " hangs" for seconds or longer or crashes completely and this is with some of the latest games, eg Half-life, half-life 2, Unreal tournament, Eve online. Sometimes the screen is severely corrupted/garbled. All can be fine for hours, then other times crashes can happen repeatedly in a period of minutes. The very latest Nvidia driver is being used. Such a "top notch" item should not cause problems - when a lesser card was used everything was fine except it couldn't do what this is supposed to be capable of. Grateful for any useful advice and all interest shown in offering help/advice.

[Gandy]

Who manufactured the card?  (Is it made by PNY?).  Try running 3Dmark (http://www.futuremark.com/) and see if that highlights any problems.  Is the problem really occuring on Halflife 1?  The graf rendering on hl one is fairly basic.  Who installed the card?  Was it a professional or did you just follow instructions supplied with the card?  My guess is that it's an IRQ error and nothing to do with the graphics card itself

[KARL]

Thanks for your interest Gandy. Points of View are the manufacturer and although both 3D Mark 01 and Mark 03 have been run successfully that does not indicate it definitely will not crash there as well - it might take several runs at it. Yes, it does crash on Halflife 1 and other new and old games, and own written programmes produce exactly the same problems. It was a seasoned pro who installed the card and has been involved in attempted use of it with other testbeds also. The same symptoms occur not only on Windows but other operating systems as well. I don't understand your reference to IRQ - there are no things to conflict with, no other PCI hardware.