A friend of mine has suddenly started experiencing problems with his graphics card. He told me it started in the middle of playing Vice City which he has bought recently. Now on every game or application that requires 3d operation of the card, bad black gliches occur, although frame rate remains stable. I told him to reinstall his graphics drivers that came with the card, but this failed to do anything, in fact, he said it possibly made it worse. I then gave him some new 'detonator' drivers that should work with all nvidia geforce cards, but this failed to resolve the problem either. His card has no fan on it, just a small heatsink. Is it likely to be a problem with the hardware, more so than a software/driver/windows problem??? Thanks in advance, Steve

A GeForce2 is kind of old. Is he overclocking it? When playing a game, how hot does the chip get???

Either the card drivers are causing this, or it is being overclocked too much. When you overclock a card, weird glitches appear in games such as bad vertex lighting. Also, certain driver versions may have problems, for example, some of ATI's latest Catalyst drivers cause a problem with Multi-Pass textures causing texture glitches in certain games, meshes break up unusually in some games. If these aren't the problems, then either other device drivers are causing it or it's a physical problem. Also, the Geforce2 MX is supposed to only have a small heat sink with no fan.

I just put an old GAinward GForce2 MX400/64 in my nieces unit that I just built and overclocked it with the Gainward CardExpert utility. Runs like a champ. If this card has not given you any probs before, and he is playing more demanding games,it may be overheating. Try mounting a small case fan blowing on the heatsink. You may have to use your ingenuity in mounting it in the case, but I do it all the time. Also, when installing updated drivers make sure that you delete the old drivers first. This can get tricky, so if you need help post back. If you don't delete the old drivers first, sometimes the new don't fully overwrite/destroy the old, and you get conflicts.

I have the same video card it had simler broulblems. It was overheating so but a 486 fan on it.