Wish it was always this easy (PC woes)

[mapsedge]

I was right: it was a hardware problem, specifically the video card.  I've never seen a capacitor "pop" before: there are seven on the card, the size of pencil erasers, and five of them blew their tops out.  Wow, guess that's a problem.

I have ordered a new card.  It ought to be here by Thursday: this one has a fan on-board, so as long as the power supply on my IBM can handle it (and I've no reason to think it can't) I should be back in business.

On to work.

Comments

[ladyniniane.livejournal.com]

Nvidia makes good stuff. I've used several of their cards over the years and really like them.

A new wireless router is in our future - this one is apparently having heat problems, and I am tired of being thrown offline at random moments...

[dr-pharmacist.livejournal.com]

I've had 2 nVidia PCIe cards pop Capacitors in the last three months...crazy!! They've either slackened on their manufacturing process lately, or something else is seriously wrong. But then again with the power capacity of the PCIe, more power = more prone to "pop". Both cards were purchased in the last 3 years or so. And both of them popped multiple capacitors when they went. One was because the onboard fan snapped it's housing and the card overheated. The other seemed to be perfectly functional. It was impressive.

I'm hoping to upgrade my M/B and CPU here before too long...I've been eying the C2Quad6600 and perhaps a 750i/780i chipset board. But for now that's wishful thinking *looks imploringly at the shriveled wallet*.

Enjoy the new video card!

[jehosefatz.livejournal.com]

In my gaming rig I run 2 512M XFX 8800GTs in SLI configuration. I love them. Pretty much always go nVidia chipset.

Bummer on the AGP though. I tend to like PCIExpress more. At least it's not ATI. Have had horrible luck with ATI cards.

My main bitch right now is that my gaming rig is a Windows box and XP SP2 (in any 32 bit flavor) chokes on my 8Gb (only recognizes 3Gb as addressable.) So, I'm probably going to upgrade to 64-bit Vista (because it's free and I don't rely on the gaming rig for anything even remotely resembling productivity... besides... "know your enemy" and all that Lao Tzu crap.)

- Jeho

Edit: corrected spelling mistakes.

[iarraidh.livejournal.com]

In tech school we used to pop caps on purpose.
We called them "confetti generators".
Of course, those were bigger caps than PCB mount types.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Never seen a video card pop caps, but Gateway used to have a *bunch* of Pentium II MBs that did it all the damn time. My sympathies.