New Video Card Disapointment

dvslats

dvslats

Charter Member
So here's the story. I see a BFG Tech GeForce GTS 250 1GB vid card at a local box store for less then $90.00 US.
Me thinks wow that's a deal! I buy it, load it into my box and things are looking pretty good. Target rich missions are much better then the old 7950 Gt 512mb. My test bed is Jerm's Vraciu's Mission. Plenty of aircraft plus cloud layers and a Task force. My old card would drop down to 15 fps when the enemy was met head on. The new one dips to 35 fps. I'm thinking nice.

But then.....the screen goes blank for about 1.5 seconds :icon_eek: ....then comes back again with everything fine except for the fact that my target is in my windscreen, collision, EOG. Hmmmmm. Never had that happen before.

The next bug shows up in the Mission Builder. Everything loads fine, but the graphic interface is ohh so slow. Rotating an infrastructure selection, dragging a area to zoom in...placing 15 or so pieces of infrastructure, and getting them where I want 'em can take an eternity compared to how it ran with the previous vid card.

My knowledge of computer hardware is novice at best, I read things on the web and as usual most of that info is conflicting.

Would any of ya'll have an idea what's going on here? Or should I get my money back.

Oh yeah, my wife just told me you had to go and mess with it...didn't you. :censored:

Here's the system's other stuff.

E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache
GIGABYTE GA-G41M-ES2L LGA 775
4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
BFG Tech BFGEGTS2501024OCE GeForce GTS 250 1GB 256-bit GDDR3
NEC Accusync 22" WS
XP Sp3

Thanks In Advance, Dave
 
Man, that sucks, Dave. Hope one of the boys can get ya fixed up. I had a Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 OC put in my machine. To tell ya the truth, I don't even know if it made a difference. Yeah, wifes sure are helpful with these situations. Hope your up and running soon, we need your skills.:salute:
 
I assume that you are using the current nVidia driver. You cleaned out the old driver in the Control Panel and then used Drive Cleaner afterwards.
I'm using a 250 card and I'm getting excellant results in Windows 7
 
I'm having similar issues in both XP3 and Win7. I recently upgraded to a GTS 250 1gig card, but i'm thinking my outdated 3 y/o mobo is to old to handle the PCIex 16x 2.0 interface requirement of the card. My PSU is cranking 550 watts and is more than adequate for the heavy tasking, but with the older mobo circuitry with a PCIex 1.0 interface and a 939 CPU socket i can't get the card to the point of sustained stability. I'm down to running the computer with the 128 mb integrated graphics on the board, so serious simming is on hold for me at the present. Looking at a mobo upgrade soon to LGA 77x socket with a dual or quad core processor. Speaking of which, i don't know your PSU output, but your other supporting hardware seems sufficient. Make sure you have your card's supplemental power connectors hooked up to the PSU.

If you can afford buying another operating system, you should try dual booting XP and Win7 and see how the card handles CFS2 in Win7. But you want to dual boot in case some of your other legacy games and sims don't run in Seven, even if CFS2 checks out OK.
 
Sometimes there are "beta" drivers that work better than the "tested" ones - just make sure you're comfortable rolling back back to your current drivers if there's a problem.
 
Hi All,
Yes, the old drivers were cleaned out with a drivers cleaner...in safe mode.
My PSU is also 550 watts: +12V @22A X 2

I made a typo in the first post, the mother board is a GA-G31M-ES2L. It is also lacking PCIex 16x 2.0 feature.

I do have a dual boot set-up, but with Vista as the alternative. Same issues in both OS's.

Tried three different sets of drivers, one actually made it worse.

Also ran a memery diagnostic before boot-up, that came out Ok.

To make the screen reset like that, me thinks there has to be some type of interruption of the flow. What you suggested bearcat seems to be the only logical explanation for what's going on. The video card mfg. claims backward compatibility, but to what level.
I'm going to keep it for now, and start a little side fund for an updated mudderboard. The way things keep changing, OS's, interfaces and such, I'll probably need it anyway.

How's Win 7 working with CFS2? Similar to Vista?

Thanks For All The Input Guys, Dave
 
This is most likely your mobo doesn't support PCI-E 2.0. Cazzy over in the FSX forums was having the same problem with a newer vid card (GTX260). he ended up getting a 9800gts that his mobo would support to fix his problem.
Getting a newer mobo will solve your problem. You might be able to find a P35 board pretty cheap (I am running a gigabyte-p35-ds3r) and it does support pci-e 2.0, and all your parts would fit nicely in mine :kilroy::icon_lol:.
Here is a Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L board that is pci-e 2.0 rated and is priced right: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128388



Joe
 
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