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

tried lots of drivers already!

If you all are having the same problem this could very well be a bad batch of cards .. Leadteck is actually one of the top makers of Nvidia cards there tech support is usually top notch ..

Try this first

Make sure your Antivirus is off update chipset drivers for your board as well as the latest drivers for the nvidia card..

Go to BIOS and make sure your AGP apagure size is set proper in your BIOS this depends on how much on board ram your card has..

One other thing you need a very good power supply for this it takes a lot of power

What I mean buy a good power supply one with a good effeicenty factor not a 35$ cheap one or one that came with the case..


let us know

I have an expensive 550 watt psu. and have the latest motherboard chipset drivers and so on. Leadtek have not replied to any of my emails AGP apeture size is set correct, and antivirus program has been off and checked thoroughly. (i contacted their technical support too).

Ok, here's the answer to all you guy's problems

I have bought the exact same card (6800GT) and had the exact same problem and this is what I've found:

The card is not compatible with your M/B!!!!!!

Try the card on another PC with a newer M/B!!!!

I did it and it sorted the problem out... It is possible that the card may be faulty itself... But I have found, to my embarassment, that usually it's a compatibility issue. Hundreds off PC's pass through my workshop and I have discovered this through the hard way...

Was that comment to me or the other guy about the compatibility..

I have an MSI kt4v motherboard with an Athlon XP2700 and 1GB 333mhz DDR ram.. Its not as if i can go out and buy a new motherboard just to get this card working. Plus if we had to upgrade our whole system each time just to get one better part, wheres the sense in that? Plus who could afford it, really!

Thanks for ur suggestion tho!

Hi sorry

Hi Simon

Sorry, yes the reply was to the previous guys with the display artifacts during the boot sequence and in windows... It's a hardware issue

I have gone back and read your problem and it seems like yours is just a software problem, presuming your games run fine and the driver only bombs out after exiting the game...(lack of info.)

1) I have found that the age of your windows xp has quite a big impact in these issues. Reinstalling a fresh copy helps eliminating possible glitches in the drivers.
2) Do you have the newst SP2 installed... DirectX 9.0c included
3) Are there any other old display drivers in the add/remove box?
4) After reinstalling windows (1st thing I would have done) and installing all the drivers... see if you can find a driver for your monitor, sometimes helps with switching resolutions.

Good luck... tell me if I missed something

PS I know the NVidia driver doesn't need rebooting after installation, it might help preventing issues rebooting for good measure, just to flush the system from pending driver installs.

Nelson thanks again for your suggestions, someone cares pity its not leadtek! Yea sorry about the lack of information, i also meant to state, that even sometimes the driver dissapears randomly, nevermind in a game, and if i load a game once that has happened the problems get worse, such as being stuck in 640 x 480, then as soon as i exit (like before) the resolution is locked at 640 x 480.

My monitor drivers are installed and working fine. I am trying to cover any other possible thing as reinstalling windows is something i want to leave as the last resort (and i have heard of others reinstalling windows and it does not fix their probs..). The main thing i worry about is losing how my computer is setup, with all these highend 3d and 2d applications I run they are quite tedious to setup all again after a reinstallation. I do not have SP2 installed, and i was not going to install it either after hereing al the ho ha about it, so wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing! Direct X 9C is installed tho. Before that card i was running a Geforce 4400 Titanium and had no problems what so ever.

Do you have onboard display?

If so I would recommend trying to reverse all the steps and maybe mis-steps you have done so far.

1) Go back to onboard...
2) Remove all display drivers
3) Install SP2, it's not that bad, it actual resolves some issues, these days microsoft gets bad publicity for everything (Not that I enjoy every major SP, they are a bunch of peckerheads!)
4) Put the card back in
5) Reinstall drivers

and then if it doesn't work...

1) Test the card on another computer
2) If that works you'll just have to reinstall windows
3) Try repairing it first
- boot with the cd
- enter
- enter (don't choose repair by recovery console also 'R', it's useless)
- F8, I agree
- press 'R' to repair
Basically it's a windows installation overwriting your current one hopefully covering any bugs, it keeps your registry entries, settings and installed programs.

Okay, hope that works!
Good luck!

Thanks man i guess i can try that. I don't have onboard video tho...

THE SOLUTION! (maybe)

I recently bought the parts for a new A64 Winnie 3000+ system, including the Leadtek A400 6800GT TDH. I was planning on building it a week after I got everything (when I had some free time) but I couldn't wait so I plugged the Leadtek into my current rig (P4 Northwood 1.6A@2.13Ghz) and it ran beautifully! Then when I built the new system and tested it I got weird BIOS corruption such as random text and symbols all over the screen at bootup. The strange thing is, the newly-built system worked fine with my old Geforce4 Ti4200 card.

I searched around, found this thread, and tried all the suggestions. Nothing worked, so I kept searching, until I FOUND THIS THREAD: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-40078.html

:bounce: IMPORTANT: :bounce: If you are getting the gfx corruption problem, are you running your PC off the battery backup of a UPS (uninterruptable power supply)? If so, then try switching the PC's power cord to a non-battery backup outlet (e.g surge protection only) and try it again. It may be that the 6800GT is drawing too much power for your UPS unit to handle. If this is the case, your system will run fine if it isnt on battery backup. Please respond to this post with your experiences!

I just got my card from a second return to Leadtek (I tried to avoid it, but nothing else worked) and this time it seems to work fine :hotbounce . First and second card had the same problems (although the first didn't start tell after a few months) but the third works fine. This seems to support the theory that there was a bad patch of cards.

P.S. I have tried my computer on both battery and non-battery surge protection and the card seems to work on both. (I will still keep this in mind if it stops working)

I'm currently in the same boat. Tried all sorts of things but now the computer refuses to boot with the card in. I didn't recognize the scrambled screen symptoms as being vid3o card related until I read this thread. Anyhow, how did you wind up returning this to Leadtek? I sent an email to the 'support' address on their w3bsite. This card worked fine for six months and then started acting up, crashed twice with the second crash being permanent (so far). Add in the scrambled screens not responding to user input and I'd bump the incidents up to five or so.
-edited to add 3 in lieu of e to avoid the odd linking process after I submit the post...

My Leadtek RMA experience

I sent an email through the support page on the Leadtek site, I got emailed back with instructions to send them info like where and when I bought the card, and the serial number. After I emailed that to them they sent an RMA request formwhich I filled out and emailed back. then I got an RMA number and used it to ship my card back to them ($5.25 Fedex Ground MO to CA, sent Thursday arrived Tuesday). i am currently waiting for them to send a new card back to me.

edit- Well after getting a couple of odd replies from the Taiwan Leadtek folks, reading your reply made me research a little more into the US website whereupon I found a similar webpage requesting the info you stated. So hopefully I get more than a language barrier reply equivalent to, "Would you like fries with that?"
Here it is for others that Google upon this thread: Leadtek Technical Support, USA

Got my replacement card!

Like I said in my last post, I shipped my old card on a Thursday, Leadtek received it the next Tuesday, and I received my replacement card the Wednesday of the next week. So not the fastest turnaround time, but quite bearable. I only sent the card itself and kept the retail box, cables, games, etc. But Leadtek shipped me a brand new (as far as I can tell) retail box including all the goodies, so now I have two copies of everything. And the card works great, no problem overclocking it from 350/1000 to 413/1120 (faster than Ultra!). So don't be scared, Leadtek will do you a solid. If you need any more assurance I can send you pics of the working card playing Doom 3, HL2, Far Cry, everything! :giddy:

I too have been having the EXACT same problems.Dont bother with the trouble of getting a new mobo or anyhting its the card.This is my 2nd LeadTek 6800gt tdh(RMA's the 1st 1)Tried the bypassing the ups thing and it seemed better but still started doinsame thing after a bit.Has anyone completely resolved this issue?I sent a tech support thing to LeadTek tonite,hopefully get a response soon.

RMA'd my 2nd LeadTek yesterday.

I think I know why our cards are screwing up

I think that the Leadtek cards are super-sensitive to power requirements, and if you fail to plug in the auxiliary power connector before turning on your PC the card fries. I know, because I forgot to do that, and when I turned on my PC the Leadtek card emitted a continuous beep until I turned off the PC. The total time that the PC was on without the Leadtek card's power connector attached was 5 seconds, and when I connected it and turned on the PC again, I got graphical corruption at the BIOS screen. SO DONT FORGET TO PLUG IN THE POWER CONNECTOR!

Yea they probley are but that wasnt the issuse for me and still got the same problems.I have an Asus A8N-Sli deluxe and it even has an extra power connector for the pci express.I also have a 500watt ThemalTake p.s. and the GPU has its very own line for power.(and has been verified with an ohmmeter of its output)Trust me when i say ive tried EVERYTHING short of one thing at that'll happen as soon as my 3rd LeadTek gets back here,and thats try a diffrent GPU!My second piece of advice is if u dont want to go through the bs just buy a BFG the 1st time and have no worries.I've several friends that have the BFG 6800gt and NONE have had any problems.

I don't usually post to forums but this thread really helped me out. Thanks all.

I do NOT have a card from what seems to be one of the original defective batch of cards from Leadtek. On my defective card, on the lower left, it says B1, and from what I gather it is already the second revisions. I bought it August 2004 and just last week I began to realize that it was acting up (at least I'm still on the year warranty). I have almost every simptom listed here: blue sploches in POST, weird articles in 3D apps, strange letters in dos mode, etc... I tried removing every unnecessary drive/card/fan while leaving my case open with a fan blowing on it and still the bug persists.

After reading this thread I decided to RMA my card. I've come to believe that the "finickynes" of the power requirement combined with questionable memory modules makes this card, at least mine, especially susceptible to damage.

Any ways, I don't know if I should be optimistic about my RMA from Leadtek. It seems that there are those who get lucky with a newer revision cards, and Leadtek is known for producing quality nvidia products, but since my RMA is already for a second revision card...