by mooresmsr » Thu Apr 25, 2013 8:51 am
Toby,
The Nvidia card that overheated, starting this whole fiasco, was a GeForce 7600GT. This is, I believe, quite a bit upscale from the visiontek/Radeon 3450 I'm trying to replace it with. Also, I'm not trying to get to HD, just to being able to view videos without dropouts. I have a cable modem ethernet connection, and the Nvidia board worked fine, so I don't think the problem is that the system or the network can't support the requirements, just that the Radeon board doesn't work. It could be that Radeon/visiontek hasn't updated drivers to Win 7, but it would be nice if they would just tell me that. Oh, and trying to play video from the PC directly still has dropouts -- missing audio, skipping video -- that weren't present with the Nvidia card.
Karlsweldt,
Checked on the fan. The sticker on it says it is a Magic MGA5012XR-O10. These are available, but everything I see says it will ship from China, and take up to 24 days to get here. Wish there was a US supply. They are inexpensive - $9 to $18 - but the time delay is aggravating. Interestingly enough, the fan on the visiontek board appears to be just about the same size, with screw connectors in just about the same spot. If I get real frustrated, I might take the fan off the visiontek and see if it works on the Nvidia. Still have the process of re-pasting the heatsink, and also making the bet that the overheat on the Nvidia card didn't fry it too much.
Also, I clobbered as much of the Nvidia driver world as I could identify. Device manager shows the new board ID, and lists the new driver version under the properties tab, but still flags the board as not working code (43).
To All,
Did get a response from visiontec warranty -- they want me to put the board into a different working system, which I don't have. Back in my days as a mainframe OS guru, when we had a problem, we'd tell the user to do a bunch of stuff that pretty much had almost nothing to do with the issue, either to get them to go away while we figured out the real problem, or get them to go away while we worked on something more critical, or get them to go away and hopefully be discouraged enough to cobble up some fix themselves. Same things happened with IBM, both the software and hardware fix people. Not pretty, but there you are. Sounds to me like the same thing is going on here -- if the tech support and/or warranty people can stall me long enough, I'll eventually go away because I'll either work something out myself, buy another card, or just toss it all in and make some educated guesses, order and build my new PC, and have the video problem go away. Guess the French were right -- plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - The more things change, the more they stay the same.
What is really interesting is that this is all over a $69 video card. We have $10,000 worth of technical effort from you guys, from visiontek tech support and warranty, and just sending me a replacement card would be cheaper, quicker, and more effective (even if the replacement card didn't work any better, because that's a solution, too) than all the rhetoric expended. Ugh.
SMM