nvidia 6800 problems

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Hello.

I'm having some serious problems with my graphics card these days.

The problems only seem to occur when I play Neverwinter Nights -- the only game I have that really taxes the card. The problems do not appear to be present under windows XP, and I never seem to have problems with other opengl things, like the various xscreensavers and tuxracer.

The problem is that, while playing NWN, the whole screen will freeze from 20-90 seconds, then suddenly come back. It will do this a few times, then finally it will freeze and knock-out the whole system (hard reboot necessary).

I have tried reducing the resolution and reducing the graphics to the bare minimum -- still happens. The card never goes above 50 degrees centigrade, and the CPU is never above 45. It always worked just fine, until a couple 'emerge -uDN world's ago... Since that time, it has been cranky ever since (about 2 months now).

I have tried drivers 169.07 through 169.12 -- none work.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

G

My system:
AMD 64 3500+ CPU
2 GB Ram

emerge -info

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:34 pm Post subject:

hi, can you post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf plz ?

pathfinder · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:04 pm Post subject:

Hi,
Does it happen also with another game?

Try neverball, or pacmanarena (do it, just to check out if it s a bug in your game)

Then, cat /proc/interrupts would tell us whether you have IRQ conflicts that may hang your system

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Sure, but this hasn't changed in 18 months. These lockups are a recent phenomenon.

My xorg.conf file:

pathfinder · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 10:36 am Post subject:

ok
have you tried asking in nvidia and NWN forums? I would try there, I am sure you are not the only one.

I rread some games had trouble (World of warcraft I dare say) with some graphic cards. (i can t remember more, sorry)

If you ran on your computer and it had the same probs from the eliveCD, try now to install it on another computer.
And see what happens...

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Oh, it certainly works on other PC's.

I am having more problems, and I am now thinking it is the motherboard... maybe a bad chipset. I'm getting strange lock-ups at other times now as well: at boot, during a forced fsck, and sometimes while KDE is idle. Something is not happy...

I don't know why it doesn't affect it in windows... but maybe I'll try that again now that it is getting crankier...
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pathfinder · Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 12:00 am Post subject:

check the power supply,
check your cables, your plugs.
RAMtest also.

check cooling.
PCI latency too (lspci -vv and follow Daniel Robbins Stability Guide part II)

Then, as GC is ok on other MOBOs,
try to unplug EVERYTHING not needed inside your PC

Run Utility software to diagnose possible hardware failures.
Use smartctl to check harddrive¡s health.

Then, I have no more ideas. sorry

with another distro? tried other kernels? (genkernel, or Ubuntu ones, overloaded)
Just to see whether it is kernel related.

Excuse me, you updated the BIOS? don t remember right now.

Darius4all · Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject:

Hi,
did you try compiling erasing "nv mesa" from VIDEO_CARS, just leaving "nvidia" as the video card in your /etc/make.conf ?
If you didn't give it a try, with

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

I can give that a try...
_________________
To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.