FX 5900 Artifacts

[doublebassdanny]

Hello everyone,
I just bought a video card off eBay, an nVidia FX5900 by BFG and when I plugged it in and turned my pc on everything went fine till I logged in when artifacts started appearing everywhere. Within a couple of seconds the whole screen was blocked out with artifacts. So I popped my old card in an uninstalled every nVidia driver I could find and downloaded the new ones. Then I put the new 5900 in, powered it on and everything looked fine (it was then running on just windows default VGA drivers). So I was all excited but then when I tried to install the ForceWare drivers the second it had finished installing them the artifacts reappeared. So basically I am baffled at this. It seems like the drivers are giving it it's problem but I am at a loss. I was running a Geforce FX5500 (crap I know lol) and that worked great. Also I have tried using this cards on different motherboards with a the same HDD and the same thing happened so it isn't an AGP bus problem or anything. Thanks for any help. This guy won't let me return it cuz apparently it was "working great before he shipped it"... *******.

 

[jeremy]

i highly doubt its the drivers , the card is faulty , i hope you learned alot from this bad ebay expirence you can just never know if the product is in good condition even if the seller claims it is and after you get it its too late and if its bad just forget about gettin your money back , in the future check feedback on the seller before you buy. if the seller got no feedback or got very negative feedback then dont buy anything from him , even if the seller got good feedbacks it doesnt guarantee he wont fool you and attempt to sell a bad condition product but the chances are lower for that to happen , to make a long short buy wisely in ebay and not blindly or buy from pc stores for better reliablity

 

[doublebassdanny]

Well actually I have an inclination that it is the PSU because I clocked my processor down to about halfway (less power requirements) and it worked perfect I played HL2 all cranked up with a beautiful framerate and got a score of 22,031 on Aquamark 3 but I want my processor clocked back up so what do you all think... should I get a new power supply or could it still be the card? I have a 300 Watt Nobilis PSU by the way. Piece of crap I think... it worked fine so far though.

 

[MrCoffee]

Yeah thats not enough power, get a new PSU at atleast 450W

 

[jeremy]

just to be sure , put your cpu to its normal/overclocked speed (whatever it is) and get into the bios and goto pc health/hardware monitoring and report back with the voltages (and just to make it a little more clear i mean put your cpu to its rated/overclocked speed and then save settings and exit and then get into the bios again for voltages checkin) , incase it is the psu i can recommend a good psu if youll provide the full system specs, you really dont wanna get a cheap psu read why at this thread why http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=96974

edit: just noticed your specs are in the sig , ill redit this when ill find a link to a good psu

edit2: here it is http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA21321
you can find bit cheaper psus that will get the job done but i dont recommend it from 2 reasons
1) they may not handle your overclock well
2) youll probably have to buy a new one if youll upgrade