Problems with 7600GT video card

[philgoff]

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I recently purchased a XFX 7600GT video card and a Samsung 22" monitor that is designed to run at 1680x1050. I am running Vista Home Premium, Intel e660 cpu with an MSI SLI Platinum edition motherboard and a Thermaltake 430W power supply.

Everything worked OK for a couple of weeks but now the toolbar at the bottom of the screen has some weird distortions and I get some flickering on the screen. I reloaded the video and monitor drivers and even reloaded Windows Vista. Nothing helped. Finally I found that if I lower the resolution to 1360x768 or if I reduce the colors from 32 bit to 16 bit then everything is OK again.

I sent a help request to XFX (Ticket 91171) and they responded that I should update the drivers, etc. I did that but it doesn't resolve the problem.

Any thoughts about whether the problem is with the video card or the monitor or something else?

[Kougar]

Double check that your drivers are set to run at 60Hz refresh rate for your monitor. You can check via the systray icon pretty quickly... does the driver give you other refresh rate options to select from? Al o are you running 16 or 32 true color?

[philgoff]

I pulled up the NVidia control panel and the only option for refresh rate is 60Hz when the resolution is set at 1680x1050. If I lower the resolution rate to 1024x768 then I have the option to run at 60Hz or 75Hz.

As I said before, if I set the resolution to 1680x1050 (the correct number for this new Samsung Monitor) and the color at 32bit the systray becomes banded and the perimeters around active boxes are garbled. If I lower the resolution or the color setting, everything looks good.

Right now I am satisfied running at 16bit color with the resolution set at 1680x1050. That isn't optimal but it looks pretty good. I still don't know if it is the XFX card or the monitor (or the NVidia driver) that is the culprit.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll wait to hear from the XFX help desk to see if there are other actions that I can take.

[xfxsupport]

What driver version are you using? We are going to try to duplicate the problem here as well. If ours works correctly then we can issue an RMA and bring your card here for testing.


XFX Support

[Richp]

I am having a "similar" problem.
In the middle of a game, my old 6600GT blew up on me (can't remember the brand) so I replaced it with a 7600GS seeing as I am still using an AGP board and didn't feel like sinking any money into a huge overhaul (MSI K8N Neo Platinum btw). As soon as I installed the 7600GS, I would lose signal. The only way I managed to accomplish anything was by booting into safe mode.

I RMA'd the card through Newegg and while waiting put an old GeForce MX 420in the box to at least get email. Worked great, just couldn't play FEAR obviously....

Newegg was out of stock on the GS, so I get the 7600GT instead. Slap it in the box and the same issue. Lose signal on and off, then nothing. Monitor goes into powersave (Gateway FPD2185W 1680x1050 @ 60Hz Native). Running the latest drivers. Just to make sure I hooked my laptop to my monitor (Dell XPS M1710) and didn't have any problems with it...VGA or DVI.

Boot into safe mode and back up my files, and proceed to do a clean install of XPSP2. During the initial install everything looks good. Soon as XP officially 'starts' for the first time....lose signal.

So, I have a RMA number for the GT, and will be shipping it off. More $ out of my pocket, plus more down time and frustration. The reason I am posting is not to gripe (well, kind of, I have never had this kind of problem for as long as I have been building PC's) but I can't help but wonder if there is something with XFX cards and MSI mobos? Since it's an nforce board I like to stick with nvidia GPUs.

Athlon 64 3000+
3GB Kingston HyperX
500W X-Connect PSU