First post, by henk717
Hey Everyone,
Today i decided to enjoy my retro computer, the room has been hot multiple times this week, but i first cooled it down to a reasonable level with the AC and wasn't doing anything intensive. All i did was letting it run Autopatcher. I had one error on shutdown and then on the boot after the Windows 98 logo (Which displayed fine) i got a blinking colored cursor and the system hang.
I found this weird but assumed Autopatcher conflicted with something i had installed and was prepared to restore my backup. I turned the PC off and back on, only to be greeted by severe corruption on the BIOS POST screen (And even before).
Leaving the PC off for a long period time doesn't seem to solve anything, i had one run since where i was able to boot into Windows without graphics corruption, however the resolution it set on the monitor was not at all the correct resolution. I rebooted again and noticed minor corruption on the POST screen again so i turned it off for the evening. Upon trying it again now it had multiple hours of being off in a by now cold room i wanted to see if things restabalized. But unfortunately its right back at the beginning, severe corruption even before i get to the BIOS POST screen.
Text will be somewhat readable, but the chance of getting a driver to load are very slim, some text characters are garbled and the entire screen will have various noise patterns that alter every time i boot. It even seems to retain some memory of what was on there before, for example if i start my Windows 7 partition since its the most stable under these circumstances i see ghosting from the Windows 7 logo before the animation of the logo begins to play and then the subsequent boot it will display different colors on the post screen. So corruption patterns seem to depend on what was displayed before.
The theme of this build is to cover as many era's as i possibly can, i chose the 6800GT because it handles DOS games well but also can run Pixel Shader 3.
But reading online i read that this type of failure is quite common with 6800GT's, and a 6800GT AGP is not one of the cheap throwaway cards.
So where do i go from here? Are there things i can try to salvage the seemingly broken card (I lack good soldering skills)? And if not, would it be wise to buy another 6800GT AGP? Or is there another card that would run 2004 era games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 well while also being able to provide DOS compatibility that is a much better choice for this build.