SL and GeForce 6200 OC help

I can't run two clients on my computer anymore since I upgraded to a 6200 OC. Every time I try to, I end up having to kill power to the computer. I get a blue screen of death caused by the video card driver going into an endless loop every single time. Today I actually got a new tip from Microsoft that has never shown up before as a result of this error. Turn off all hardware acceleration completely on the video card, so I did that. Only now SL won't run at all with the hardware acceleration turned off. I have to have it turned on just to run ONE client.

What can I do to make this POS work with SL the way it's supposed to? LL and Nvidia need to start talking to each other and get this fixed.

What version of Windows and the Nvidia drivers are you using?

In SL, go to graphics preferences (under the edit menu) and select hardware options. Set the amount of memory to half what your card actually has and see if that helps running a second viewer.

Disclaimer: You're probably not going to like what you're about to read. Sorry about that, but I do have to be honest.



I'm curious how a 6200, overclocked or not, can qualify as an upgrade from anything. Not only is the GeForce 6 series five years and five generations out of date, the 6200 was the lowest level discrete card in the series. In case you didn't realize, with most nVidia cards, the second digit is the most important one. Anything x2xx is going to be extremely low end.

Unless what you had previously was a nothing but a couple of monkeys with chisels and stone tablets drawing your graphics for your computer, it's hard to imagine UPGRADING to a 6200. It would be serious downgrade from almost any other card you could imagine that would be in operation today. Out of curiosity, what did you have before?

In any case, overclocking almost always results in stability problems, unless you have considerable expertise in tuning computers as a whole, in addition to tuning any individual components. In my experience, it's just not worth messing with. Even my friends who are even geekier than I am try to avoid it.

The first place I'd start in trying to get the card working properly would be downlclock it back to standard nVidia specs. Once you've got it working at normal speed, then and only then should you experiment with overclocking.




What are you defining as an "endless loop"? What exactly is it doing? What does BSOD actually say?



My guess would be the message is referring to instability caused by the overclocking. Most likely it's telling you to turn off hardware acceleration because the rest of the system can't handle what the card is doing.

This of course presents a serious problem because almost no 3D engine, including SL's, will run without hardware acceleration. That's precisely the reason we all put video cards in our computers in the first place.



Again, I'd start by downclocking it back to standard spec. Next, uninstall your drivers, run DriverCleaner, and then install the most current driver for the 6 series you can get. I believe all cards in the 6, 7, 8, 9, and 200 series use the same drivers these days, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find what you need.

Really, though, my strongest suggestion is just to ditch the thing. If you purchased it recently, return to wherever it came from. I wouldn't even have recommended that card while it was current. But while back then, it was simply low end, now it's low-end AND 5 years old, which makes it orders of magnitude worse. Frankly, it would be something of a small miracle for it to handle anything as intensive as SL. Replace it with something better. Get the highest second digit you possibly can.

I'm guessing it's an AGP card? That of course narrows your possibilities considerably. I notice all the nVidia AGP cards NewEgg currently has available are 5200's and 6200's, save for one 5500, and I certainly would not recommend going all the way back to the 5 series. So you might be stuck. In that case, it's probably time to start thinking about a new computer.




Acutally, LL and nVidia talk all the time, from what I've been told. They're in pretty regular communication, which is one reason SL works so much better on nVidia hardware than on ATI hardware. But without a really good, solid, magic wand, there's not a whole lot to be done to make a resource-intensive program in 2009 work well (if at all) on hadware that is from 2004. Even modern high end cards have difficulty handing SL. It's not really fair to blame either company when something so hopelessly out of date proves to be not up to the task.

What I had before, was a motherboard on this computer with built-in graphics processing, that uses system memory as graphics memory. Anything is an upgrade from that.

As for why I chose this specific video card, it's the only thing for sale in town locally. And that only because we have a Wal-Mart. That's all they carry. BFG Tech Nvidia GeForce 6200 OC, with 256 megs of video memory, take it or leave it.

Gotcha. Yeah, anything is better than IGP. But still, investing in something so out of date is pretty much pointless.




Well there's your problem right there. It's almost impossible to get decent computer parts at a brick & mortar store these days. NewEgg, TigerDirect, and other online retailers are where you should be doing your shopping. There's no getting around that anymore.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for supporting local businesses whenever possible. But for computer parts, that's simply no longer an option. It's really online or nothing.

I'd highly recommend you return that card to Walmart. Order something better online. TechForLess.com, for example, is currently selling a brand new 512MB GeForce 7600 GS for $118. That's about as good as you're going to get for AGP.

http://www.techforless.com/cgi-bin/tech4less/VCG76512SAPB?mv_pc=google_base&tts=20090504020701


That said, I'll repeat one more time, your best bet is to replace the computer. If it's old enough to have an AGP slot in it, then everything in it is ancient technology. Rather than continuing to sink a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there, into that old dinosaur, you could get a replacement that would run circles around it, for as little as $400-500.

Something like this, for example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227077R


Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Well, I have learned that I didn't have the latest drivers. So much for trusting Windows Upgrade to know whether or not there are updated drivers for the thing, so I manually tracked them down and got them installed. Haven't stress tested it yet to see if that makes a difference.

As for the AGP slots, etc., this is plugged into the PCI slot, this computer is only three and a half years old (still awfully old for SL though, and I should just let the company come take it, you wouldn't believe the interest rate I'm being charged on this thing).

Somebody else asked what exactly the message was. Last night I forced the blue screen of death (before I downloaded new drivers) so I could write it all down word-for-word. So here it is:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

The problem seems to be caused by the following file: nv4_disp

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

The device driver got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device iteself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly.

Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x000000EA (0x863DAD10, 0x85AE0320, 0xACE7DCBC, 0x00000001)

nv4_disp
Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance.

Let this be a lesson to you. NEVER EVER EVER let Windows Update touch your drivers. It has no idea what it's doing in that regard. The proper procedure for updating drivers is as follows. This should take you about 5-10 minutes:

1. Go to the manufacturer's website, and download the driver you want, directly from there. In this case, that would be nvidia.com. Don't try to install it yet. Just download it.

2. If you don't already have it, download and install DriverCleaner. Don't run it yet. Just download and install it.

3. Uninstall your current driver via Add/Remove Programs. Note, this will only be a partial uninstall. Windows is incapable of completely uninstalling drivers on its own. That's why you need DriverCleaner.

4. Reboot to Safe Mode. To get into Safe Mode, tap F8 repeatedly as the computer is first powering up, to bring up the Boot Manager. Pick Safe Mode from the list of boot options.

4. Once in Safe Mode, run DriverCleaner. This will clear out all remaining traces of your existing nVidia driver.

5. Reboot normally.

6. Upon booting up, Windows will likely offer to automatically install software for your video card, via the Found New Hardware wizard. Don't let it. Cancel out of the wizard. Install your new driver manually, by double-clicking what you just downloaded from nVidia.

Failure to do any of the above steps will likely result in improper installation of your new driver. Every time you change driver versions, you MUST follow the above procedure to ensure things go as they should. No exceptions.




Yikes, it's even worse than I thought, then. Sorry to have to tell you this, but PCI video is atrociously slow, which is why AGP, and its successor, PCI-Express, were invented. With PCI, you're not likely to see the benefits of the overclocked card at all, since the interface will be such a bottleneck.

It's like turbo charging a car that you only ever drive down residential side streets. There's obviously not much point in souping up the thing to go 200 miles per hour if the speed limit on the only streets you ever use is only 25. I'm guessing the "OC" in the card's name is just a marketing gimmick.

The good news is that for some reason PCI video cards are a little easier to find than AGP cards. There are much more modern cards available with PCI interfaces on them than with AGP interfaces. It's weird but true. NewEgg currently has a 1GB 9500GT PCI for $99. That will run circles around the 6200.



Really? They were still making motherboards without AGP and/or PCI-Express three years ago? And it cost you enough then that you're still paying for it now? I'm amazed on all counts.




OK, I've looked up some info on "nv4_disp infinite loop". It seems it was quite common with GeForce 5 and 6 series cards, and the cause was bad drivers. From what I can see, solid fixes for the problem started to appear in nVidia's drivers starting in 2007.

With any luck, this means that replacing your existing driver with a new one will eliminate the issue. You're going to need to do this right, though. Don't cut any corners. Follow the above instructions to the letter. You don't want any remnants of that old bad driver hanging around.