GlosRFC
26th September 2006, 21:54
The fan on my ATI Radeon 9800XT has been making some strange sounds lately...grating and grinding as it tried to spin. It was clearly overheating because the monitors would just suddenly switch off - but then they'd work again after a reboot. Of course, I put off replacing it for as long as possible until Sunday when my entire screen was suddenly replaced by heiroglyphics. It reminded me of the days of trying to get CGA and Hercules cards to work.
So I bit the bullet and whipped the case open. Sure enough the fan on the video card was wonky, and there was a lot of black bits of plastic where I would've expected to see transistors and chips, so I risked a quick trip around town to see what deals were available on a replacement. Goes without saying that PC World didn't represent any value at all but I stumbled across an nVidia GeForce FX5200 for £30 in Comet. Even though they were practically giving it away at that price, I had to stand at the till for 10 minutes waiting for someone to stroll over to take any money off me.
And so on to installing it which actually turned out to be quite an experience. I took the opportunity of replacing the CMOS battery too - surprisingly not one of the electrical stores stocked such items but, on a whim, I called into Halfords and they had display stands full of them. So in went the battery. Turned the PC back on to be met with a crescendo of error beeps. Strange really as nothing else had been removed at this point. So out came the memory chips, turn on...BEEP! Back in they go and success as the PC fires up. So now out with the old card and in with the new...BEEEEP! Uh-oh, thinks I. Back out with the memory chips, in with the card...BEEP! Slap the memory chips back in and hurrah!!! No more strange symbols on screen.
So now it's another half hour resetting the BIOS to its optimum settings and another reboot. Windows fires up and recognises the new card. However, it now fails to detect the modem. Off comes the case again, out goes the modem and it gets pushed into another PCI slot. And now here I am back again - both 19" monitors working in a dual setup (although I've still got to figure out how nVidia deals with them as it's not quite as intuitive as ATI's adapter drivers) and all software and peripherals humming along nicely. Talking of humming, the new video card only has a heatsink so no more rattling fan :)
The moral of this tale is never give up if things don't appear to work as you would've expected at first. Even replacing one card might require unplugging and reseating everything else that's attached to your motherboard. Computers...funny old things. :rolleyes:
So I bit the bullet and whipped the case open. Sure enough the fan on the video card was wonky, and there was a lot of black bits of plastic where I would've expected to see transistors and chips, so I risked a quick trip around town to see what deals were available on a replacement. Goes without saying that PC World didn't represent any value at all but I stumbled across an nVidia GeForce FX5200 for £30 in Comet. Even though they were practically giving it away at that price, I had to stand at the till for 10 minutes waiting for someone to stroll over to take any money off me.
And so on to installing it which actually turned out to be quite an experience. I took the opportunity of replacing the CMOS battery too - surprisingly not one of the electrical stores stocked such items but, on a whim, I called into Halfords and they had display stands full of them. So in went the battery. Turned the PC back on to be met with a crescendo of error beeps. Strange really as nothing else had been removed at this point. So out came the memory chips, turn on...BEEP! Back in they go and success as the PC fires up. So now out with the old card and in with the new...BEEEEP! Uh-oh, thinks I. Back out with the memory chips, in with the card...BEEP! Slap the memory chips back in and hurrah!!! No more strange symbols on screen.
So now it's another half hour resetting the BIOS to its optimum settings and another reboot. Windows fires up and recognises the new card. However, it now fails to detect the modem. Off comes the case again, out goes the modem and it gets pushed into another PCI slot. And now here I am back again - both 19" monitors working in a dual setup (although I've still got to figure out how nVidia deals with them as it's not quite as intuitive as ATI's adapter drivers) and all software and peripherals humming along nicely. Talking of humming, the new video card only has a heatsink so no more rattling fan :)
The moral of this tale is never give up if things don't appear to work as you would've expected at first. Even replacing one card might require unplugging and reseating everything else that's attached to your motherboard. Computers...funny old things. :rolleyes: