Palit Daytona Geforce 4 Ti 4200 (2002 - 2004)
Friday, August 27, 2004
A moment of silence please. Thank you.
It all started when I entered Unreal Tournament 2004 one hot summer day and the textures and objects got strangely corrupted after playing the game for a really short time. I suspected a driver problem so I rolled the drivers back and forth but with no real results. I didn’t fire up UT2004 afterwards but then the errors came back while playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. And then when I finally got Doom 3 and eagerly installed it, it turned out it was practically unplayable. I suspected the overheating was caused by the original cooler on the card which was of particularly bad quality and besides it was filled with dust. But absolutely no improvement was detectable even after I cleaned the cooler and greased the fan. So yesterday I bought the Titan cooler kit which I installed with great care genuinely hoping that it will solve the problem since the copper cooler is really massive. Unfortunately it wasn’t the case.
A typical Doom 3 session went like this: I started up the game, but sometimes even while in the menu the planet got distorted, strange spikes appearing everywhere (basically the planet object was corrupted). Sometimes it locked up right in the menu sometimes it locked up in the game and this lockup means that for a while the whole system seems blocked but then control comes back after a while but there are no textures in the game. Basically I move around some black objects… So playing Doom 3 was a no-go.
So today I took it out once again, the 1 millionth time I guess, and I discovered the source of the bad. Some components at the edge of the card look fried and that’s where the card is the hottest. I think something went really wrong in the heat of this summer. That’s the only plausible reason I can come up with because I never overclocked the card or did other stuff that could’ve damaged it this way.
Unfortunately now even my Windows desktop is getting messed up, strange errors appearing everywhere, so I guess it’s time to say goodbye and shut down until I figure out where to get the money for a new video card. :-(
Update OK, it’s not so bad after all but I’m rather stupid. Turns out the corrupted desktop was the result of not connecting the fan to the mainboard…