Well, as some of you remember from another thread, I purchased a PNY Geforce 6800 GT off ebay. Came in excellent condition, no scratches or any dust. Well, the problem I'm having is in games I'm getting graphical distortions. Lines coming from characters and such. Sometimes the screen will just go black (I think after coming into contact with one of these lines directly in my characters field of view) but I can still see my health bars and other things.

I reformatted last night in hopes this would solve the problem. It didn't. I'm using forceware 84.21 (I'm pretty sure it's the latest). I've tried older drivers to no avail. I checked temperature (it was running 54C core right after trying Oblivion), the fan is running on the cooling unit, power should be fine (550W PS), and I've even tried reseating the card.

Now I don't know what to do. Does anyone know what might be causing the graphics problem? It only seems to occur in games, even if I turn graphics settings all the way down. Agent, you said you have a 6800 GT. Did you encounter anything like this?

My next reaction is that it's a PNY! Lifetime warranty! Send it back!

Are you sure this is a 6800GT??  or is it a 6800 that was oc'ed before you got it??  Try getting NTune or RivaTuner and clock the card down some.  That may fix it.

My next reaction is that it's a PNY! Lifetime warranty! Send it back!

From the link to the product llDayo posted:

Warranty and Service
   One year (plus an additional 2 years upon completion of a registration form on PNY's website)
   The latest up-to-date drivers at www.pny.com

PNY    

They used to have a lifetime, but even then, most lifetime warranties are non-transferrable, ie, only the original owner.

My one buddy had a geforce 2 card that we overclocled the living Crap out of  and it locked up really bad.  about 2 months after that it had those exact symptoms.  We permanantly damaged the thing.  Try underclocking the card.  if that solves it, the original owner probably overclocked it to see what he could get out of it and then sold it on ebay.

The easiest way to enable overclocking on an nVidia card is to use the CoolBits registry entry.

You can just google "coolbits.reg" or paste the following text into notepad and save it as "coolbits.reg". Then double-click the saved file to import it into the registry.


REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
"CoolBits"=dword:00000003


STANDARD WARNING: Messing with your registry settings can be very dangerous to the health of your computer. If you do not know what you are doing, please don't do it.

With that said, after importing this into your registry, you will have a new entry on your Nvidia settings called Clock Frequencies. Select manual overclocking and slide the sliders to the left a little bit at a time to see if it clears anything up.

How much are you willing to sell one night with your wife for?

Considering the poor quality of the potential consumer it'd have to be an awful lot for her to even think about it!



hehe