7900 GTX Problems

I am trying to fix up a Point of View 7900 GTX water-cooled card on my Son's PC.

The machine runs a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 board with a 2.4GHz cpu and 2GB RAM, and I have just wiped the old Vista OS (it was wrecked) and installed Windows 7 Ultimate.

The OS installed stock Microsoft Drivers (circa 2009), but the display (DVI interface) showed one or two horizontal pixel-thick lines, usually white, on the background image.

I updated the drivers using windows Update to the latest MS ones and the machine crashed, then rebooted. I got it back with System Restore and tried running the System Performance test. It crashed after a black screen and rebooted.

I then loaded nVidia drivers (2012) for the card, but get the same issues.

What is going on here? I have tried a stock Radeon low-performance card and the machine runs fine on that.

Is this a hardware fault or are all 3 drivers buggy?

Regards
Andrew :|

Have you tried the card in another computer?

depending on available slots you could also try running the card as a second card in the machine and run some diagnostics on it.

Why was the previous OS trashed - possibly card has gone faulty

John

Thanks for taking time to reply.

My Son spilt some liquid over the machine and blew his new Palit video card.

But Vista was a mess anyway, had recursively added multiple folders all by itself n times so the disk appeared nearly full, and they wouldn't delete.

So I wiped the OS and reinstalled the original (dry!) 7900 GTX that came with it then loaded Win 7. That's when the problems started with this card.

Any update of the drivers beyond the May 2009 Microsoft release crashes the system. At one point yesterday it became almost unrecoverable as I had to roll back 3 System Restore Points to get it going again ("BadPatch" error).

By Hiding the video driver updates I now have it mainly stable, but still with random horizontal lines on the display and the occasional black screen.

In answer to your specific questions :-

1. I have other machines but none has the specific PSU cable required for this card.

2. There is only 1 PCIE-16 slot in this machine so I cant install it as a second card.

Is this card known to have any issues? If not I suspect it is also faulty.

Can you suggest a reasonable-cost replacement? I don't know anything about high-performance cards and would appreciate any guidance you can give for a card that would match this m/b and cpu combination. The previous Palit card gave a Performance Index of 5.6 which seemed to be about comparable to the cpu and disk ratings.

TIA
Andrew

I am not one to be recommending any current cards.

Hopefully some of the more knowledgable members on graphics cards can pipe in with some suggestions.

Post a suggestion of what you are budgeting for and that might help foster some suitable suggestions.

Say 50 - 80 GBP. Anyone in UK who can offer a suggestion?