First post, by botond87
Hi there,
I recently grabbed a first revision Geforce 2 MX for my FIC-VB601 & Pentium II 400 rig, booted it up, got into Win98…and almost immediately started seeing major artifacts, that got so bad, that I couldn’t identify anything on the screen about 2 minutes in.
After powering off and booting up again, I entered the BIOS and waited to see if the artifacts appear again - sure enough, after about 2 minutes in, the screen started collapsing again with artifacts getting worse every passing second.
I thought to myself okay, since there is no heatsink on this first revision model, I’ll just strap a small heatsink to it with a bit of thermal paste (the chip was getting pretty hot to the touch after about a minute) and test it again. The heatsink also got pretty warm, but the artifacts still destroyed the screen after 2 minutes.
At this point I thought okay, the seller sold me a fried card (although claiming that it’s in working condition), so out of rage and a bit of curiosity, I planned to install some drivers, and downclock the card, to see if that would bring back some life into it. So I switched the GF2MX to my GF4, and installed the version 30.82 reference drivers. Then I swapped back to the GF2MX and just managed to point in the device manager to the driver folder, before the screen fell apart.
Now comes the curious part: to my surprise, after rebooting the rig, the artifacts were gone. The card was recognized by the driver successfully, everything seemed to be in order. I waited on the desktop for a few minutes to see if the artifacts would come back - nope.
Then I got a bit cocky, and fired up Giants to make the card squeal, played for 30 minutes straight - no issues whatsoever.
I’m still planning to do a proper stress test, but this behaviour still puzzles me. I’ve never seen a card that presented artifacts - even in the BIOS! - and then just started working normally after a fresh driver install.
If I wasn’t desperate enough to get a driver installed, I would’ve easially just dropped the card into my junk pile, and called it a day.
At this point, this is just an interesting story that I wanted so share with you all, but I still don’t get it, how the card manages to work.
TL;DR: card with massive artifacts suddenly works after clean driver install.
Did anyone have a similar experience, does anyone know how this is possible?
Thank you for reading, cheers! 🙂