Grrrrr….. Thats the only sound I can utter right now. What’s the deal: this week my P4 PC thats just over 14 months old started to malfunction. It started with my videocard that seemed to go on the fritz. But as it turned out, it wasn’t the only thing wrong with it.
It started last weekend when suddenly my videocard started to garble my screen. First I thought it might be the driver (it’s a MSI Gforce FX5600) but even after upgrading to the latest version, it still happened. It should have been a warning sign, but I ignored it (unfortunately) until my PC started to crash!
I rebooted a few times and after that all seemed well. But after crash no.3 I started to get more suspicious. So I decided to open up the PC. Low and behold: the damn fan on the videocard had died! Essentially the card was dying from getting overheated!
But that wasn’t all! When I turned on my PC so see if the fan really wasn’t turning, I also noticed some other problem: the fan on the power supply wasn’t turning either! Wtf! Luckily the CPU fan was alright or my PC would have died already completely!
Coincidently I already had a similar problem with my old AMD Ahtlon PC about a year ago: the CPU fan died on it and I replaced it pretty easily. Off course I wanted to replace everything as soon as possible, but because of my work I wasn’t able to get my replacement parts until this saturday.
I bought an 300watt Enermax dual fan (the previous one had only 1 fan) for euro 55, and got a new videocard fan (copper) for Euro 15, with some dorky LED’s on it (mostly for case modding). Since I had my PC opened up anyway, I decided to upgrade my memory as well, so I got another 512mb PC2700 memory for it (Euro 80). If there is one thing that applies to computers: the more RAM the better 🙂
Anyway, it took me about 40 minutes to put verything in, had to play around a while for my memory to work (first it only recognized 768mb instead of 1gig), but after that it was fine… So I thought…
I fired up Soldiers of Fortune II and noticed immediately that I still had some distortions in the screen! Bummer! Major bummer I should say!
So now my PC is lightning fast with the extra memory and works great in 2D, no problems there, but when I start any 3D program it crashes after a while. So for sure I have to replace the videocard as well, wich will set me back at least another Euro 200 !!
Also, since most new videocards are PCIe (PCI Express), and mine uses AGP 8, it will be hard to find and choose a good new videocard. I am thinking of a ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, but it seems that the nVida 6600 series is a real 9800 killer. But finding one in AGP is a problem because they mostly are made in PCIe version…
Grrrrrrrrrrrr…..