PNY Nvidia Nightmare

unfortunately, it appears that all great organizations suffer as a result of their sucess

There are several things that are not clear in your description of the problem. Did you put the system together or are you just describing the specs for a system you bought? How did you determine that the graphics card was the problem? You see I have also had problems similar to this and it was not the graphics card.

TOP

The system was put together in November '06 by a very reputable local computer shop. I have been using it since then. The computer shop and I have completed exhaustive troubleshooting over the course of two months, and isolated the graphics card as the source of the problem.

Right now, I have a very low-end Nvidia "loaner" card in my system while I wait for the proper card (so the same drivers are being used), and the issue is not presenting itself.

What problems did you have, and what did you do to fix it?

In the past I've seen systems put together by Tristar that had bios conflicts between nic cards and the video. That video card works for the vast majority of users. I would be willing to bet that the real root cause of the problem is somewhere on the motherboard.

Skymonkey,

I can't really help nor can anyone else here without more details. Your builder may be reputable, but until the facts are posted here this is more of a rant than a plea for help in understanding what happened.

We need to know specifics for the system. Motherboard Model of graphics card and drivers used Make model and number of memory sticks Operating system including service packs Release and service packs of SolidWorks Case/Power supply make and model Hard drives/ make and model

Methods used to trouble shoot the problem.

And finally, to answer your question, it turned out that the power supply was the problem.

I've been in contact with PNY a few times over the years, having standardized on their Nvida Quadro boards in my workstations quite some time ago. They have always been patient and accomodating to my tech questions. I seem to remember their engineer being on the East coast rather than the West coast but that's irrerelevant to your problem. So on to the topic of Nvidia being a categorical problem? No. In fact I won't touch an ATI chip with a ten foot pole. (please everyone, ymmv, but Nvidia Quadro for a long while has, imho, been the most stable and best performing cad gpu). As a side note, AMD acquiring ATI may be the reason I start giving Intel a try on the desktop again. Well, that and the fact that my new Core2 Duo notebook with Quadro FX2500M absolutely rocks.

These guys are giving you good advice. If you've had card after card giving you trouble you need to look deeper into motherboard and psu. If you stuck in a lower end card and it works you may find that the power supply is too weak to power the higher level card, or to Matt's point, you may have an IRQ conflict that doesn't exist with the loaner card. Either scenerio is highly possible. First I would disable most of the integrated devices on the mobo and run the tests with only the FX1500 card and a hard drive running. Is your "reputable shop" familiar with cad boards or is this a first for them? Granted the FX1500 is not a barn burner but it does take more juice than an "average" 250W power supply can muster. Even a cheap 350W power supply could be overcome by that level of card. Unless I missed it you don't mention how many cd/dvd drives, hard drives, usb hubs, etc. you're powering so we can't tell how much juice you've consumed. Search google for a power supply calculator (sizer) for an idea of what you need based on what you've got in this box. And if the shop has been hammering on this with you suggest to them that they let you try a good large (>430W) psu for a week or so and let it run. They should have access to post cards and diagnostic software to help them through this. This shouldn't be a completely blind task for them.

Good luck.

- Eddy

Just as a sub note, I had the same problem with my Nvidia pcie 3400 card, guess what? Antec 550W power supplies on two machines were naff. caused all kinds of weird problems, but worked fine with a cheap card.

i've bought recently a workstation with the same GC as you bought - it works perfectly with solidworks. the only difference is that mine is an AMD system with ASUS M2N SLI Deluxe mobo. my power supply unit is 450W.

That actually could be the issue. What size power supply in the problem box?

--Scott

thanks for the feedback everyone.

The power supply is fine. It's a 650W unit (Freedom as I recall... too lazy to go find the box). They tried other power supplies during the course of the troubleshooting, just to 100% rule that out as well.

The shop definitely is used to building high-end machines. They build boxes that are one step below large rack-mount ones for processing extremely complicated mathematical problems. They also have built high-end CAD machines.

The thing that puzzles me, is that I've seen my mobo and graphics card combo for sale at places in the US, Australia, etc., and have confirmation that the combination has been problem-free. Am I just the lucky one that gets all the bad cards?

The IRQ is a new suggestion - I'm going to get the new card hopefully tomorrow, and if it is still posing a problem, I'll have them check that as well. I'm pretty confident that these guys know what they're doing though!

I looked at the spec for your mobo. It is set up for the Crossfire ATI gaming cards. Could that have something to do with it?

CrossFire

Supports ATI CrossFire graphics cards (blue @ x16 mode and black @ x4 mode)

Certified Crossfire Get the right components for your gaming PC

I had been wondering about that as well, but it does indicate that it is a cross-platform controller.....

Okay, 3rd card now, new drivers, new bios. The thing is still flashing - worse than before. I think I will return the system to the shop, and start fresh. Any suggestions of mobo/chip/graphics card combos?

no - any suggestions?