One thing that i just can't stand whatsoever is when people blame well know graphic card Manufacturing companies for stoopid little things and give them such a bad name after they have done so much for you... Here's what I found....
I had the most bizzare problem with my Gainward 6800LE and believe it or not,,,i solved the problem. I bought my card 3 months ago and suddenly the games started freezing up after about 10-20 minutes of games play. It gave me a black screen and had this annoying sound looping that forced you to reset the pc, but it didn't help. I had to power the pc off completely in order for it to power back up. The funny thing was that it never crashed or froze or reboot when i was inside windows, only when I tried to play a game. I've tried games like Doom3 / Half life 2 / XIII / Farcry and all of them gave me that black screen and crashing the pc completely after about an hour of gameplay. Halflife 2 worked for about 5 minutes at the most before freezing, which made this the worst of all games tested. I tried replacing memory,,,cpu,,,motherboard,,,reinstalled windows,,,nothing helped. I sent the card back to the manufacturer and the card tested ok? I couldn't believe it and they couldn't believe me either. I took the card back home,,tried it again and it still gave me black screens. Then I tried something that sounds very stoopid,,but it worked. I disconnected all my hardware (modem / dvdrom / dvdwriter / case fans / neon base lights) and only had my 6800LE and hard drive connected to my motherboard. I loaded Half Life 2 and played the whole night without a single crash or black screen. The conclusion was that the next Gen Graphics cards require allot more power from your power supply than what you think. I had a 300Watt power supply and obviously it wasn't enough for this 6800LE. They don't warn you on the box or in the documentation (if you receive any) about a recommended powersupply, but if you go to their website,,you will see that they actually recommend atleast 350Watt for this product. If you experience any problem related to this,,,change your power supply to atleast 400watt. Who would have thought that this could affect 3D graphics?
The card is still running at 67 degrees after 2 hours of Half Life 2, so it's not an overheating problem. The reason for the card giving problems after 3 months is, during the 3 months before the problem started I bought a modem / tv capture card / 4 case fans and neon base lights. That's the reason for insufficient power from the PSU all of the sudden. Please stop believing that the bios settings are incorrect and that the manufacturer sold you a crappy card because they wanna make money off something that is broken, aswell as to only buy the new version of the card because the old version of the 6800LE is the sinner, also please ignore rumours about the memory clock set too high and that if you set the memory clock slower (from 700 - 600MHZ) that it will resolve your problems, because it wont. Please ignore all perceptions about Riva tuner changing your bios settings, because it is utterly nonsence, any changes can be reversed because it's a software tuning tool, or simply uninstall Riva Tuner. You can't damage your card by opening any pixel pipes or vertex shadings because i've tried it. There was also an incident in a different forum where a guy had exactly the same problem as the rest of the 6800LE owners and he also replaced his power supply to solve the issue, the was using a 6800GT. There are so many rumours out there but no physical solution to the problem.,, so here you go.
Swear at me if you please.....
