Diagnostic software for nvidia 7600gs agp?

For 6 months my dell dimension 8250 win xpsp2 dirx9c with Nvidia 7600 gs agp has had more frequent random lockups, now very often. It happens almost immediately now with any 3d games, but even using the desktop. I have tried the newest drivers, old drivers that used to work fine, but to no avail. Win xp gives vague error messages blaming video drivers, but no change helps. I did a full reinstall of winxp, but it still happens. I dont seem to get crashes when I am in safe mode or with the generic non-nividia default driver. Vid cpu temps are only 40-50s.

My next step is to try to reseat the card and power cable but whyy that would be a problem now, I dont know.

 

Oh well, when I looked carefuly at the card all the capacitors had cracked and leaked

Looks like a dead card; I'm surprised it functioned at all. I wonder if it started with a power surge...those surge protectors don't seem to do much.

 

I know you've figured out the problem, but I'm leaning more towards over heating. Are those video temps while playing graphic intensive games?

 

The card is about 4 years old and when I bought it I installed one of those custom Zalman heat sink fans on the card that would drop the temp about 15deg C. When I kept the heat sink clean, the gpu would run low 40s C and I recall maybe 50s during gaming. Maybe lately it was about 8-10 deg higher but I had not cleaned it. What I read on the EVGA sight was that you had to get near 100C to even get slowdown, much less fry the card. Am I wrong on that?

 

Nope, you're not wrong at all as I've had my OC'd GTX's running at %100 load 24/7 upto around 90C, too bad you're past the warranty period.

 

You could use either NVIDIA Inspector or Speccy to keep an eye on the temps.