Nvidia 6600GT issue

[Chris Brown]

Hey everyone,
I’m working on my 9 years old’s computer; an old dell 4600 with a nvidia 6600gt installed. The card worked fine under xp and vista and for the most part still works in win 7. The problem is that when the computer is running a game ie Flatout2, after a few minutes of normal play the computer monitor will turn off. I looked at the pc and it is still on. I unplugged the monitor from the vga and used a converter to plug it into the dvi and tried again. The monitor again shut off in the middle of gameplay, only in dvi it turned back on and the computer was restarting. I am not sure if it was restarting when it was plugged into the vga because the computer monitor stayed off until I turned the power off. I used both the windows version of the driver and I used the nvidia websites version of the driver. I even reinstalled windows and the same problem persists. It appears to crash only on graphic intensive games as it does not crash when she was playing plants v. zombies. Anything I can do to fix this?
Thanks,
Chris

 

[bobkn]

What drivers are you using?

Whether the latest ones would help, I can only guess.

NVIDIA DRIVERS 260.99 WHQL

 

[Golden]

Hi Chris,

Can you please fill out your system specs as shown in the image? I'm especially interested to hear about the PSU : perhaps its under-powered?

Regards,
Golden

 

[Chris Brown]

Yes, I tried the latest drivers to no avail.
It’s a 32 bit win 7 ultimate instillation (legit).
Intel Pentium 4 at 2.66Ghz
2GB of memory
Plenty of HD space
The card used to work flawlessly under XP and Vista in the same machine with the same configuration. This is just weird as heck for me, doesn’t seem to make much sense.

PSU...this is what I could find: Documentation

 

[Golden]

Mmm...thats only a 200W PSU, but you say it worked fine using XP before, right? The same game?

I wonder if your card is overheating. If you remove the side panel of the PC and have a look inside it whilst it is running, are all the fans turning/spinning? Is there much dust accumulation inside the PC?

Regards,
Golden

 

[smarteyeball]

Mmm...thats only a 200W PSU, but you say it worked fine using XP before, right? The same game?

Two good points here.

Whilst the wattage is fine, it may be starting to show it's age and 'more demanding' games maybe pushing it over the edge and drawing power the PSU can no longer deliver.

Are you sure the PC hasn't simply frozen? When you swap inputs, is that a 'hot swap' (while the PC is running) or after shutting down etc?

I wonder if your card is overheating.

When was the last time it was given a clean?

You can download GPU-Z to monitor the cards temps. (make you tick the 'save to a logfile')



It could be a simple driver issue ( perhaps try a much older Forceware version) or it could be a component going.

Moving from XP to 7 could be merely be a coincidence.

 

[Ivan the SoSo]

On average a psu drops 10% per year

 

[Chris Brown]

Hey guys, Happy New Year!

Thanks for all the help. It's a pretty clean machine; I dust all of our computers every few months. I swapped inputs only once, and it was not a hot swap, I might give that a try. I will also try the older driver to see if that will help out and will also try to monitor the card temp using the recommended software. Most likely I just need to get something newer for her and donate this pc to the land of broken toys.

Best,

Chris