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By: [ Editor ] Asked from United States of America

Is my Nvidia card acting up?

I recently replaced my Nvidia GeForce4 4200 Go video card in my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop because it died. It was replaced with an Nvidia GeForce 5200 video card. Ever since then, I've experienced very slow performance in Maya. My drivers are current. But when I tumble around a character in Maya, or playback animation, the performance is extremely slow. What should be real time playback is strobey. Then all of a sudden, it would speed up to real time. But if I close that file and open it again, the performance will be slow again.

Also, when I first start up my computer, most times, I get a black screen. I can hear Windows booting up, but my screen stays black the whole time. I have to repeatedly turn my computer on and off until I get a display on my screen. It's not my monitor as I've attached an external monitor and it behaves the same.

And I've been recording some tutorials prior to my video card replacement. But now, I can't record at all. When I hit the record button in the recording software, the software hangs. I had to drop the record fps rate to 6 and even then, I would get extremely steppy performance. And the resulting video clip is useless.

I've gone back to reordering my original spec video card to see if it helps. It should be here in a week. Any ideas?

Oh, not sure if this matters but I had to replace my hard drive at the same time as well. 2yr olds and laptops do not mix.

Thanks

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olivier gagnon [ Editor ]

Hi Manny,

By reading what you posted here, it's definitely (95%) a video card problem.

It could be the RAM on the card but it could also be a GPU problem since when you boot up your computer, the problem is not always there. When you boot, the video card will always use the same memory range to boot. So the problem could be "alternative" bad memory in that range or the GPU. ceteris paribus. I'm taking into account that it was working good before.

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