LOTRO Killed the Video Card (Suggestions on New One?)

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Livingston, Sep 29, 2008.

  1. Livingston

    Livingston Private E-2

    First up, here's my system:

    Intel Core2Duo 6600
    Asus P5B Deluxe
    GF 8800 GTS
    2Gb kit Kingston 667Mhz
    320Gb HDD3 Seagate SATA2 7200RPM, 16Mb CACHE
    Pioneer 16x Dual Layer(8x)
    Black Thermaltake Soprano Mid-Tower VB1430BWS
    Super Flower 600w PSU
    Windows XP Home Edition (SP 2)

    This was purchased roughly 2 years ago.

    **************

    Lately the only game I've been playing is City of Heroes which isn't very graphics intensive at all.

    Today, I loaded up Lord of the Rings Online for the first time in about a month and within 5 mins my screen froze and then everything went all blocky and red, almost like the bricks on Super Mario (Original NES). When I restarted the PC the screen was very weird just like in the old NES (2 NES references FTW!) when you'd have to take the cartridge out and blow in it. There were numbers in weird places and everything was very blocky. The comp restarted itself before it could get into Windows, so I tried Safe Mode and it made it into Windows and was working fine, but there were 2 light colored stripes down either side of the screen. So I tried to restart it again and once more it reset before it made it to Windows.

    So I tried taking out the video card and putting it back in, and when I powered on, it made one long beep followed by three short beeps, which I believe indicates a graphics card error.

    About 2 weeks ago I went through and dusted my PC with some canned air. Only thing is I didn't think about the fan on the video card. I only remembered to dust the video card one time about 2 months after I got it, as it's the first card I've had with a fan, so I forgot it was there. Needless to say the fan was chock full of dust.

    I messed around with a few things trying to get it to work, but from that point on I only ever got the beeps at start up. So I'm assuming that the card overheated and just died on me. I only really posted the above in case, by some miracle, someone might know something I don't and suggest something else, but I'm pretty sure it's fried.

    My mate has given me a defective, but usable GF 8500 GT in the mean time.

    So what I really want to know (other than miracle info about the original) is some recommendations for replacing my video card with the system I currently have. There's a possibility that I could upgrade my PSU as well if it would make a huge difference between what cards I could run. My preference is an Nvidia card, but otherwise I'm open to suggestions. :)
     
  2. Livingston

    Livingston Private E-2

    Bueller?
     

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