Black screen of death during 3D applications

[No1uNo]

I have a GT220 1gb video card running on Vista. In summer the fan started making noises so I shipped it back to the manufacturer (BFG Tech) to be fixed. Shortly after I shipped the card they told me they were going under and my card would be shipped back unrepaired.

My card came back so I bought a replacement fan off of ebay. The fan seems to work fine but now my card doesn't work well at all. It functions fine on regular 2D applications and seems to work on some older 3D games (NFS Hot Pursuit 2 for example) but anything that requires it to use a little more of it's horsepower (Blur or Burnout Paradise) causes an almost immediate black screen of death. First the monitor loses all video signal but the sound still plays. After a minute or two the sound jams as well.

I've tried reinstalling games, updating the card drivers (even doing a clean install), updating my DirectX and nothing works. Since it didn't do this before I removed it to get it fixed, I'm guessing it's probably related to the new fan maybe not providing enough cooling but I'm not sure. Any ideas?

 

[No1uNo]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that games like Blur and Burnout load up fine and run great through menus as long as there's nothing requiring 3D rendering in them. As soon as I get anywhere in the game requiring 3D rendering, everything quits and the screen goes black.

Edited to say: sorry, just read the forum instructions and saw that I'm supposed to use "edit" and not reply to myself. Now I know. It won't happen again.

 

[Tmagic650]

What are your complete system/computer specs?

 

[No1uNo]

My computer is a few years old so it's not state of the art by any means but I just bought the video card last April and it's been out of my computer since August. Here's the specs:

AMD dual core processor at 2.4GHz
2 Gigs of DDR2 Ram
Windows Vista Home Premium (32 bit) with all current updates
Geforce GT220 1GB with current drivers and DirectX and has never been overclocked
250 GB Hard Drive
22" Viewsonic LCD monitor

That's all I can think of. Am I missing anything? I'm also going to try putting the old fan back on the card and see if that changes the behaviour of the computer at all.

 

[Tmagic650]

"I'm also going to try putting the old fan back on the card"... You took the GPU fan off? If so, did you clean off the old thermal paste and sparingly applied new fresh thermal paste?

 

[No1uNo]

Ummm, you know that probably would have been a really good idea.

I had to take the GPU fan off because it was dying and needed to be replaced. The fan unscrews nicely from the heatsink without detaching the heatsink itself from the GPU but I only figured that out after I'd already removed the heatsink.

I totally forgot about putting fresh thermal paste on but I don't think it matters anymore because it looks like my video card is pretty much cooked now. I had to revert back to the onboard video because now when I boot up the computer even the boot screen is totally garbled.

Expensive mistake.

 

[sH1fty1985]

My computer is a few years old so it's not state of the art by any means but I just bought the video card last April and it's been out of my computer since August. Here's the specs:

That's all I can think of. Am I missing anything? I'm also going to try putting the old fan back on the card and see if that changes the behaviour of the computer at all.

What exactly happens when the black screen comes up... does it force a restart;make beeping noises from the case; just shut off completely?
I know you could probably pick up any "decent" card now a days that could fit into your motherboard under 75-80$.