3D OpenGL Problems? Defective PNY Card?

I don’t know if anyone out there can help with this…

I purchased a PNY Verto GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (64MB, 4x AGP) card back in November 2002. Everything worked fine with 3D games such as WarCraft III and Jedi Knight II until mid-summer of 2003 (JKII is an OpenGL game, WCIII is either Direct3D or OpenGL, I’m not sure). My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X.

I run JK II at 1280x1024 with 32 bit textures and color (always have since I bought the card – natively supported by my 17" Viewsonic LCD). After the problems started, there was “streaking”, discoloration and other lighting / particle effects problems. Here is one screenshot of a level with problems… http://www.freewebs.com/vrx/files/streaking2.JPG . If I change the resolution to 1024x768 SOME game levels no longer exhibit this problem.

In WCIII, the character models have holes in them (yes, you can actually see through them and see the terrain). There are also blacked out blotches and quite a deal of flickering on the terrain itself. Again, some lighting and particle effects have problems, especially with transparencies (ie, gas / smoke / mist effects) and it seems as if these elements form discrete colligative blotches of light.

Everything in 2D games work fine.

My attempted solutions have included:
-Uninstalling and reinstalling drivers
-Reformatting the entire hard drive and reinstalling Windows 2K with the latest video drivers and DirectX
-Updating my motherboard chipset with the latest patch
-Flashing the bios to bring it up to date

Nothing has worked… I suspect this may be a problem with the card itself.

Anyone with experience or know of a similar problem? PNY will replace the card but I will have a week of downtime… computer availability is crucial at the moment as I am rushing to organize everything for college apps.

-What kind of drivers are you using?
-Did you checked if the fan on the card is still working?
-Is the heatsink covered with dust?

I came across a lot of Geforce4 coolers that where starting to fail after 6-9 month…

I’m using Direct X 9.0b and nVidia Detontator FX 45.23 drivers. I think my fan is still working.

It doesnt look like a driver problem but it sure looks like a hardware problem with the card itself.

If you can, return it.

That’s what I’d say too… card is probably cooked.

When you get an Nvidia card, also consider additional cooling. In my case, I have a case fan blow air right onto the card.

I also removed the fan that came with the card, scraped off the thermal crap that was glopped on and put on a thin layer of good ol’ Artic Silver III in it’s place.