My leadtek (winfast a400 GT TDH) geforce 6800gt is doing crazy things

Hi i also bought my Card in July (A400gt) , after a month of it working fine i Had the same frigin problem as all of you guys,

Whats funny is that i live in New Zealand, so i dont think these defective cards where limted to just a bad bunch.

God dam you Leadtek ,

i just want to say that i got my 7800gs a few days ago and it works great it even got a g71 core and i was able to over clock it to 543/1420

First off, I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem. I also found this link with a little help from Google. My "helpful" support person through this is also John Zhang.

My card '6800GT TDH PCI-E', has the same corruption on boot bios screen and into the windows boot process, just like everyone else. After sending in my RMA request on the card I shipped it, two weeks later I get my card. I'm thinking awesome!, nice fast service. I first took a look at the card they sent me and noticed some dust and the typical black burn marks on the contact, typical of older refurbished cards. I was kind of taken down from my high hopes of good service when I saw that. Then was even more discusted when it had the same problems as my original.

I sent them a harsh email saying I would like a full refund or an upgrade to a card of equal value of my original purchace price. I got a reply saying we don't give refunds and gave me a link to the RMA page. I replied that I refuse to pay to ship them the card back at my expence. A day later I recieve an email saying they will mail me a shipping label. I assiume this will take the standard week and a half to get to me, then 3 weeks later for a hopefully working card.

Thanks for the help unleashing my rant.

i just want to say that when i had called them last time i had talk with john zhang and complain well everyday in the end it was either teh 7800gs or the pci-e 7600gt have u try talkin to the manager?

I want a x1950xt AGP editions!!!~`1111oneteen!!11

you mean x1950 pro, right?

damn......

I probably should have sent my card back in as soon as I got it, as I did notice some issues with the card. Like a loud fan, and some weird graphic issues in 3d games.

The issues have gotten even worse now. The fan is pretty loud and sounds like it could fail, it sounds even worse when the computer first starts up. Personally I think it sounds like the bearings in the fan are bad. When it starts up though it sounds like the fan is actually hitting the heatsink.

If thats not bad enough, while playing 3d games I'm getting all kinds of different corruption. Tears in the world, parts of the world disappearing, being able to see just a bunch of meshes at times and the screen goes black at times. With different drivers the errors move to incorrectly drawn graphics, in WoW the ground goes entirely red, and I can get texture corruption. Some drivers are better than others about that stuff, it doesn't really make much sense to me.

Then while in 2d mode I've started to get bsod and instant computer resets because of the card. Oh the joys of bad memory.

The real topper comes in as I tried to give them a call, and no one was there or they were not answering. One of the messages I got from the tech department was that they were not in for the thanksgiving holiday..... forgive me if I missed something but wasn't that last week. You would think they would be back by now.

For now I've just sent them a service request. Lets see how long it takes them this time around.

I just read this entire thread in safe mode. my eyes are killing me.

So I have a leadwek a400 gt tdh and it worked fine for a little over a year. during some half-life2 gaming it covered the screen with lines and then crashed my whole system almost immediately. i took the thing apart and reattached the heat sinks and everything but it happened a few more times. finally one time when i booted it up i got all those artifacts everyone is talking about in the BIOS, and when I got to the windows (xp x64 pro) loading screen, it would reboot.

however if i tried safe mode it loaded. so i uninstalled the nvidia drivers that i had and it defaulted back to the windows display adapters (circa 2002) and now i could once again boot into windows normally (however the BIOS artifacts are still present). After doing research i stumble upon beta drivers for the 6800gt (and many other cards) released by nvidia. i install and run them and i am back to my original problem of auto-rebooting everytime i get to the windows loading screen.

so it seems that after working fine with the nvidia drivers for more than a year, windows decides that it didn't want to use them anymore, it wants to use its own, ****ty drivers that run the card with the efficiency of a quadriplegic traffic cop. 'look ma, i can max-out the shadowing on tetris.'

i can deal with artifacts in the bios if the card works fine otherwise, and im the type of lazy **** that would rather buy another 6800gt (not a leadtek though) for 150 bucks than deal with the RMA process. so i am wondering, are there any drivers out there that run the 6800gt series for windows xp x64 professional that i may have missed? also, if you are having the same problem as me and haven't tried a driver swap, i encourage trying it, cause maybe it's just my computer or something. either way i'd really like to know.

You can forget about trying different drivers, your card just took a crap on you. It isn't windows, and its not your drivers. These cards have some bad ram in them. I'm not quite willing to go as far as to say the heatsink is part of the problem as well, but I suspect it may be. Either because its just not stable enough or its a bit to heavy to be hanging there like it is without more support.

Anyway you look at it though your card is on its last legs. Here is your current problem. You have a graphics card that runs on the agp slot. Unfortunatly there are not a lot of those left. Soon you'll need to upgrade your motherboard and graphics card to pci express, I'm in the same boat here. But the thing is if your going to buy a new card you may as well get the new motherboard and go with the pci express. Myself I'm going to get my rma taken care of so I can save up some money and replace my motherboard cpu and graphics card at pretty much the same time.

The only current problem is Leadtek usa is currenly in the process of moving their offices somewhere else. I was told they were going to be out of their current offices on December 15th. Because of this its been very hard to get in contact with anyone there. I believe its also kind of problematic for sending in a card right now, as tech support probably won't have much time to look at it. A bad situation all around right now.

Ah well thanks for the bad news haha. no honestly I mean it; now I can stop struggling with this thing. However, I guess I forgot to mention, I have the PCI-E version of the card, not the AGP. when you plug it in and screw it to the case it sits very firmly in the slot, despite it's weight. The motherboard I have even has a plastic latch that locks the card in when it's plugged into the slot. But I do believe you that it's a RAM issue. A lot of people have 6800gt's and windows x64 pro, and i haven't run into anyone else complaining about x64 drivers for their cards except for people with this leadtek.

yea, i've been thinking of getting a new mobo/cpu too. I'm so god damn tired of having to find 64-bit compatible drivers and hardware, it's a pain in the ***. god damn 32-bit dual core comes out right after i build my system and all of a sudden no one gives a flying ****ball about 64. oh well, i guess that's not totally true, and i can always wait for the socket 939 64-bit dual cores (which may be out by now for all i know). either way though, the 64-bit enhancement wasn't worth the aggrivation in my opinion.

Lol having the pci express version helps you out a lot there. Not so much to have to upgrade.

I hate to say it but the dual cores that have been released are all 64bit enabled. It doesn't matter though you can switch back to the 32bit version of windows no matter which cpu you have, the intel core duo or the amd 64's can run either window32bit or 64bit.

Yeah the athlon 64x2's have been out for a while now. Amd is getting ready to launch quad core cpu's in the not to distant future. Intel already has some quad core cpu's out there. Though amd has a newer socket than 939 called the am2 that you'll have to switch too. I know you can get the x2's in 939, but its unlikly that amd will release 939 versions of the quad core chips

haha shows how much I know. I researched this stuff when i was building my system and right before dual cores came out. before and since that time i have not really put any effort into learning about anything computer related. i just like playing the games.

but again, thanks for your help and information.

Hi! I just wanted to say I managed to change my faulty 6800gt with a 7800gs.. I dealed with leadtek europe, and I can't say they haven't been efficient.. at the first RMA they sent me another crappy 6800gt.. at the second RMA I requested the 7800gs.. and when they had it in stock in just 1 day it arrived! quite quick for a shipment from the netherlands to italy.. in my case I can say I had great support..

You make sure you connected molex ?

Did you try another card on this mobo ?

Could be a bad card,, or bad hd-15 connection,

either or,