thechangelab.com

Day 3 – thechangelab project

The Exploding Video Card

Well, it finally happened. After surviving the years of use the ATI card finally choked. It happened while running Mplayer full screen under KDE. There was some pixelation and blobs of red and green areas appearing. Initially, I thought it was the video file itself. Sometimes, the quality of a torrent can get messed up a little. But then my screen went black. For a while my keyboard worked, as I tried to manually kill the app. Even SSHing in failed. So I began the humble reboot…

This is when the sweating began.

It booted into a black screen. Nothing. I couldn’t even get to see the BIOS. Trying my old Knoppix CD and a bootable floppy failed as well. The second time I cold booted and I heard the dreaded beeps. Opening up the chassis and rebooting gave the same result, while peering inside. Everything seemed to be running, but the system refused to boot and provide a display.

The last time I’d heard something like this was while tinkering with an MSI board a few years ago. The manual stated what the different types of beeps meant. Of course, the less-than-informative Iwill DBD100 motherboard manual had nothing to say on the topic. So I replaced the video card with my spare ATI card. Same apparent type and name, but a different version. I finally got my screen back.

Fortunately, I didn’t try something stupid like forcing the card to work. A bad and/or dead card on a working motherboard can be a real risk. You just never know if you’re going to end up frying something else along the way.

Anyway, no more day-long fullscreen video playing for now. However, this gave me the needed push to purchase an upgrade.

I put in an order for a compatible card that was on sale at clearance pricing. A Matrox Millenium G450 card (manual in pdf). 16MB, AGP (voltages at 0.8, 1.5 or 3.3), dual head.

 

 

 

 

Being able to run two monitors with the dual head is nice. But the distinguishing features for this card are: its ability to handle just about any AGP slot, and the fact that it’s from Matrox.

Unix support for ATI (now of AMD) and NVIDIA can get flaky, or non-existent depending upon the card. In contrast, Matrox cards are well supported, relatively speaking.

The fact that it can handle AGP 2x and 8x just saves me from buying another videocard, should I ever upgrade the motherboard.