[mythtv-users] Is my video card toast?

[Gabe Rubin]

More information added below

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Gabe Rubin <gaberubin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Today was a particularly hot day and my apartment gets even hotter
> than outside temps.  I came back home to see my mythbox running very
> slowly and not really responding (even when I would fire up an ssh
> shell, keystrokes were taking forever to enter).
>
> I checked top and Xorg was eating pretty much all the CPU (around
> 98%); this was just when myth was running but not playing any
> video/music/tv, etc.  I also saw that my Xorg.log had the AGP GART
> line below many times, with it broken up once by the driver
> encountered too many errors, failing back to legacy PCI mode:
> (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized AGP GART.
> (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized AGP GART.
> (WW) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA X driver has encountered too many errors.  Falling
> (WW) NVIDIA(0):     back to legacy PCI mode.
> (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized AGP GART.
> (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized AGP GART.
> (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized AGP GART.
>
> When I finally got myth running, the screen had a very weird colored
> static pixelation in a few of the square areas that the menu and the
> icons are.  The clock part was perfectly visible.  I could not
> navigate through the menus.
>
> I have an 6200 fx card with a passively cooled heat sink.  The mythbox
> is small and compact and there is not much free room in it limiting
> airflow, although, I have never really seen the temps beyond what they
> should be (then again, as I said, the apartment was particularly hot
> tonight).  I opened the box up and reseated the video card (in the AGP
> slot).
>
> Is it possible the card just got too hot and died?  If so, I assume it
> is a goner, but is there anything else I should try before replacing
> it?
>

I am able to load the nv driver and I am able to play things with xine
(although, obviously running myth with the nv driver is a
non-starter).

When I run with the nvidia driver, the screen looks fine when it is
loading and pre-scaling theme images (although, now it seems to be
stuck at 84% of theme images).  I upgraded the nvidia driver to see if
that would work, and no luck.