Graphics GeForce 6600GT - PC hangs when playing video?

Hey, I wonder if you guys can help me with this.

I've got a really weird problem with my computer. I bought a Leadtek GeForce 128mb 6600GT card about a year ago now, and up till about 9 months ago, everything worked fine.

Then, all of a sudden, I couldn't play videos anymore. Doesn't matter what type, they all have the same result under XP. I open a video file and the computer hangs. Firstly everything stops working, but the mouse is still active, and then the mouse hangs too. It will sit like this for hours and is only fixed by me rebooting.

I tried opening a video in Linux (Knoppix) and it opened an uncompressed AVI - and played the sound fine, with the video VERY slow - one frame per second ish. WMV's failed to load some driver, and mpegs failed as they do on windows.

I thought windows was to blame - so formatted and reinstalled - same results.

I then thought the graphics card was fubar, so I put my old GeForce 4 MX (64mb) into the machine, and everything started working OK. - I put the newer card back in, and the problem came back - so I presumed that it was at fault - and sent it back to Overclockers, who replaced it.

Now, with the new card, the very same thing happens. I tried the card in my fiancee's old PC last night, its a 4 year old compaq AMD machine, and while the card seems to work OK in that and plays videos fine, when I tried to play GTA San Andreas the graphics were really off - vertexs in the wrong place, textures applied wrong, and it looked as if the world's 'bounding box' was being shown.. very weird!

I've been using Windows Media Player, Windows Media Player Classic, the DivX player, and a DVD player program. I've tried about 4 different driver packages too - all from the NVidia site. On my fiancee's PC with GTA I was using the latest drivers from the NVidia website.

So, I'm at a complete loss.

Do any of you lot have any idea what could be my problem? I've tried playing with the BIOS settings on my motherboard, but it made no difference.

My PC Specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+
some cheapo motherboard
SB Live! Value (very old - don't mock me..)
80GB Maxtor HDD
20GB Western Digital HDD
1gb Unbranded Ram
DVD Writer
CD Writer

..and that's about it.

Thanks in advance.

Alex.

 

It's possible that OcUK just sent you the same card back again. It sounds ridiculous, but it's happened before, and the likelihood of getting two cards which display the same symptoms in multiple machines is very low.

Did you uninstall the drivers on your fiancee's machine before you swapped the cards out? That might explain any silly 3D behaviour. If that wasn't the case, then try it now and see if Vice City works; if it does then the card is probably not at fault.

 

Im not sure it was the same card - I forgot to package the extras in the box (the games, and the connectors) but in the box they sent back they were all there?

I did remove the drivers when I tried it in my fiancee's PC.

Cheers for your thoughts.