Via chipset KT133 and system instability

[Tim Wunder]

On Tuesday 24 December 2002 03:05 pm, someone claiming to be Ted Ozolins 
wrote:
> Jerry McBride wrote:
> >>I still have problems. I've also got the feeling that my video card may
> >> be going bonkers on me. When I switch to a console (Ctrl-Alt-F1), I'm
> >> now getting white spots on a portion of my screen. I also get ghosts
> >> when dragging icons around the desktop.
> >
> >Turn off box, remove cover, unplug video card, run pencil eraser across
> > card edge connectors, plug card back in, close cover and reboot box. test
> > for video anomalies...
> >
> >Go get beer...
> >
> >
> If your video card has a large hesatsink (or any heat-sink) get it away or
> get other cards away from it. (HEAT!) Depending where your AGP slot is of
> course. On one of my boxes the AGP is off to one side away from the pci
> slots, The problem box has the AGP slot right up against the pci slots
> which caused heat problems and was fixed by moving pci gards away from
> the agp slot. If your CPU has been running too hot for too long and now
> is showing up on video is a very bad sign. Do these spots show up right
> after powering up as well, or does this happen after your system has been
> up for a while?

X crashed right away after a cold reboot (after replacing RAM). I don't think 
it's heat, but rather fonts. Removing AbiSuite true type fonts from my 
fontpath solved that problem (at least it seems to -- my wife used the system 
today without any ill effects). I still think the card is failing, though, so 
I bought a GeForce2 card today (Jaton, I'm not real sure about its quality, 
but the local mom & pop computer store said it should be fine) to test out as 
a replacment. 

I *still* have problems with large compiles breaking (particularly rebuilding 
Xfree86 from SRPM). I'm currently suspecting either heat, or CPU. I got a 1G 
Duron processor this morning and a nice Thermaltake CPU fan/heatsink with a 
7000 RPM fan. Sometime in the next couple of days I'll be swapping out the 
processor and testing again. The current Mobo/CPU is not without its tainted 
history. When it was fairly new, the CPU fan failed and the board ran *very* 
hot for a couple days (it wasn't on 100% of the time, probly around 25%). He 
recalls being surprised that the CPU wasn't fried. This was about 2 years 
ago. I think it's finally crapped out on me...

Tim

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