Problems with 6600GT vid card

D

Dissevered

Posts: 8   +0
Hey guys Im new here so hi :)

so, ive been reading a lot about this 6600gt card and it seems many people are having trouble with it. Is this card junk?

Ive tried a few different drivers now and a few different settings with the vid card, all have problems. on 1 driver my comp would freeze and during play you would see glitching. another driver got rid of the glitching but it still freezes. It freezes playing old school games like Half life 1: TFC. I upgraded from a 5200fx and honestly it seems like i downgraded. the graphics look better but i dont know what to do about the freezing.

its been freezing with the card at 45-60 degrees max, so i dont think its over heating.

my system stats are as follows:
kt8 neo mobo
1gig of 400mhz ram
amd 64 2.0ghz

the cpu is running cool as well. Does anyone know anything that will fix this problem or should i return the card and get another one? If so, can anyone recommend a good AGP card for around the same price I paid for the 6600gt?

Thanks in advance for any advice :)
 
In general, the 6600GT is an excellent entry level card (it DOES matter what company made your 6600GT of course).

I would suspect that the cause of your crashes is not that there is anything wrong with the 6600GT (although that is always a possibility). I would lean more towards thinking you don't have the latest drivers for your card, or for your motherboard chipset, or perhaps need a bios update.

Another possibility could be your power supply. Cheap power supplies cause so many (hard to diagnose) system crasheｓ. Who made yours? How many watts is it rated at?
 
its rosewill 450w, i just got it with the card because my old supply didnt have the juice.

Edit: oh and the vid card is an elsa. ive never heard of the brand personally, but it got the best reviews for a 6600gt on newegg.com
 
Agreed. After fixing my latest computer dilemna, I can see how important that every component work together flawlessly. Ironically, I fix computers for a living, but had never had one as stubborn as my own (turned out being both video card and mobo). Like Don said, if you don't have a good power supply, look into an antec or another good quality power supply with lots of amps on the 12 volt rail (good trick for determining quality--not all the time, though). I'm not sure what type of freezes you're talking about, but RAM is a constant problem child. You can try swapping it out. Try a bare install of windows with good, updated drivers for your chipset and video card. We'll see if we can eliminate software problems. You've kind of got me worried. I'm awaiting a 6600GT card which is in transit. I bought an eVGA model and it has a lifetime warranty, so hopefully it'll work out!

Regards
 
Elsa should be fine, but I don't know anything about "rosewill" power supplies... which isn't necessarily a bad thing but certainly isn't a good thing...

Was it cheap?

Still, I'd start with updating all your mobo chipset/AGP drivers and do a bios update and see if that doesn't fix you up first.
 
Rosewill is a value brand, but they make some decent stuff. I've had good products from them and heard a load of good reports. That doesn't mean items can't be defective, though. Do what Don said, and then double check settings in bios or the video settings as well. After that, try a graphics benchmarking tool (3dmark) and see how it performs on that.
 
Can I just go to the manufacturers website to update everything or is there a better way?

I D/Led n_bench v3 and everything did fairly well. most of the scores were similar except 1 of the 3d tests wasnt all that great. it was about half as good as the rest.

also, thanks for the quick replies :)
 
I usually go to the part maker's website for the drivers. I.e., I believe your board has VIA drivers for the chipset. I'd get them from here (confirm that you have via before installing of course):

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=2&Type=1

And yes, your bios should be downloaded from the board maker's site. I just put together a system last week with a bios that was only 1 version old, and the system was crashing as soon as I installed the AGP drivers. Updated the bios and problem was solved.
 
Update:

chipset update stopped the freezing (after that games lagged pretty bad at odd spots)
proceeded to update BIOS and that stopped the lag (i think, havent done extensive testing yet)

my vid card has been on the latest driver so I think im done? I even updated my ethernet drivers ^_^

The only problem that remains is the static/fuzz that pops up sometimes. Happens in both of the games I play which are CS Source and Guildwars. Its just a quick flash of randomness. sometimes its a shape, sometimes a box, sometimes colorfull dots. Any Idea what this is and how to fix?

Thanks again for the help :)
 
It could be temperature... a GPU overheating can sometimes cause graphic anomalies or flickering static-like effects.

How is your case cooling? Do you have any case fans to keep the innards cool? If not, you may want to consider adding a case fan- as well as inspect the videocard placement and videocard cooling fan to ensure it has some breathing space and the fan isn't blocked by any loose wires.

Worst case scenario- you can Google and look for Coolbits- which is a registry file you can run that will add a clock/temp page to your existing NVidia drivers. With these, you can try backing down the GPU clock or memory speed a hair to see if the anomalies go away (lower speed = will run a little cooler). If this does it, then you'll really know you have an artifacting problem from temperature.
 
I dont think its the GPU, its running at 43-45C

could it be the CPU? I read something about cpu bottlenecking. how a lot of the time problems occur because the cpu cant keep up with the gpu.

also, this coolbits. is it version 2.0? I dled it and it was just a registry editor file... is that right, or the wrong thing?

edit: NM i got it lol ^_^
 
Hrmm.. one other thing you can try is see if your BIOS has an option for Fast Writes. If so, disable this and run your games again.

On some of those VIA chipset mainboard, Fast Writes can cause visual anomalies or glitches like you've described.
 
coolbits is a program pre-embedded into Nvidia display modules. They make people unlock coolbits by themselves for some reason. all coolbit downloads are registry tweaks that automatically create a value and file in the Nvidia registry to enable coolbits which you can then find when you right click your screen and click NVidia display, then you go to clock frequency settings. To edit the registry yourself just run regedit and find HKeyLocalMachine, then software, then NVIDIA corporation, then NVtweak and in the right pane right click and create a new DWORD value and assign a value of 3.
 
Also... now that I can adjust the GPU speed settings, I was messing around a bit. There is a detect optimal frequencies button, and every time I run the test, it comes up with different values. All of them over clock to some extent. Is it ok to trust the test or should I just keep the settings at stock?
 

Similar threads

B
What happened to my computer?
Replies
8
Views
2K
bushwhacker
B
S
That time when a Waymo robotaxi drove off with a passenger's luggage after the trunk failed to unlock at the airport
Replies
12
Views
119
BuckarooBonzaii
BuckarooBonzaii
zohaibahd
Nvidia is investigating RTX 50 crashes and black screen issues, but no fix date yet
2
Replies
28
Views
1K
LimyG
LimyG

Latest posts

Back