Not really retro per se, but I got a new motherboard and GPU for my WinXP machine, as I felt a bit constrained by the AGP slot in that board (given I want to play late DX9 games like ES4:Oblivion decently)
so I got an ASUS A8N-SLI SE board, along with a compatible GF7950 GX2, which as far as I know the most capable DX9 native card one can get . The board is nice as I can keep that Athlon 64 X2 4400+ .
the installation of the card was really odd though. When I first assembled the board and card, I got a bunch of graphical issues , basically massive screen corruption, the card struggling to boot into Windows (I had to reinstall Windows anyways due to some conflict between the card, the board and the remains of the VIA drivers from the old board). with only Safe Mode working. sometimes I could boot into Windows, but running any game would freeze the computer within 5-10 minutes, usually with a bunch of garbage appearing on the screen.
after trying a bunch of stuff like different drivers, BIOS updates, fan speed controls via MSI afterburner. different slots, less RAM , single GPU mode, nothing worked, eventually I kind of gave up
Today just out curiosity I turn that machine on , and for whatever reason the card worked fine.... Ive been testing it for some 2 hours with various games/benchmarks from 3DMark01 and GTA3 , to 3DMark06 , Doom3 and Quake4 , all of which crashed within 5-10 minutes beforehand but now run fine......
anyone know why this can happen? I will keep on testing it, but its not broken down yet. One thing I did notice was that beforehand the fan control was very unresponsive, whereas now its fine....