green lines with geforce256 - error

im having a serius problem, a lot of 3d games, every game actually, tends to get stuck, and only pressing reset will do any good. when that happans, the screen turn black, with only a line of green lines across the screen on the top like this - | || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || || |
usually green, but sometimes blue, it never happand to my friends, and it doesnt happans regurally, so i can predict, some games do it more, and some less. do tu know what it is?

Perhaps the chip is overheating. My friend’s GeForce 256 has similar problems, and he blames it on the busted GPU fan.

–Won

i had the same problem a half yoear ago, maybe the driver was to old but, i think it was overheating the ram, because i get after a month later a standing brandmark on the screen, which was a memory burn-in( right english?? ) so check out the ramclock/temp …

wo wo wo, slow down. what should i do? buy a new fan?

If you don’t have some kind of hardware monitoring, feel (CAREFULLY!!) the temp on your video RAM and core HSF when this problem occurs. If it’s very hot and the fan is stuffed, get a Blue Orb. I also stuck heatsinks on the RAM chips on my GTS. I used good thermal paste/thermal adhesive (Arctic Silver) on the Blue Orb/RAM heatsinks and dropped the temperature around 5-10 degrees. I never had any problems in the first place though, just playing around with hardware. Have a look at any good overclocking retailer online and they’ll have everything you need. Doesn’t cost much either.

so i should add an extra fan on the video ram and/or the system ram? it is not a software problem? cass, matt, can you verify?

I didn’t mean putting a fan on the video RAM - I meant replacing your current fan on the video chip’s core. Only put heatsinks on the RAM if you really want to. Then your board will look like one of the GeForce3’s on all the hardware review sites! Be aware that replacing your fan could damage your video chip core unless you are careful and know what you’re doing. It depends on how your current fan is attached to the core now. I was lucky, my old fan just came right off. If you do replace the fan you must put some type of thermal compound/paste/frag tape between the new fan and the video chip core. If not, you’ll cook the chip.

Only replace the fan if you are sure that’s what is causing the problem. Otherwise you’ll be wasting time and money.

Hope that helps.

what are heatsinks and what do you mean video core, the graphics card?
and im not sure thats the problem, hoe can be sure?

If in any way possible, return or exchange it now. My friend had a GeForce 256 DDR in his system and about a week after he got it, it started locking up in games. It was definitely not overheating. Before long, it started showing signs of memory corruption. Many charachters on dos screens were showing up cyan instead of white (as if a bunch of bits in one of the memory chips were failing). In windows, a bunch of random pixels around the screen were messed up. We exchanged the card for a new one and it has worked perfectly for about 1.5 years now.

By the way the cards (both the original and the replacement) were Hercules/Gullimot 3D Prophet DDRs

Heatsinks are little aluminium blocks with fins that maximise surface area for dissipating heat. Video chip core is the actual part of the nVidia chip that does all your graphics processing - like the little metal square in the middle of my AMD Athlon. Look at pictures of GeForce3’s on any of the numerous hardware review sites online - all of them have heatsinks on their RAM and fans on the video chip.

Only mess with this stuff if heat is a problem or if you’re a hardware nut. I did it because Australia in the middle of summer gets pretty hot in my computer room so I needed the best cooling I could get. I’d advise listening to LordKronos’s advice as well though - see if another card makes a difference. If you can’t replace it, try a friend’s card or maybe you can borrow one from your local computer store.

ok, thank you very much, i have bought it a year ago, so changing would be difficult, but one last thing, can it destroy the card?

Sounds like the card becomes unusable under some circumstances anyway - that’s as good as “destroyed” in my book.

What about underclocking the card? Have you tried that?