Hello guys!
So I've been having a problem that i will explain later on but first I'll give some context: (TLDR at the bottom)
My mom was in need of a gpu only as a display adapter, because she doesn't do anything graphically intensive, so we got her a Geforce 8400 gs that was gifted to us by a local computer shop. The thing had no fans, only a radiator and an empty fan slot. After a while, my mom started having problems with her screen being completely static and other problems, so I decided to give her another card I was planning to use in another project and started to diagnose the 8400.
I booted with the card in my "testbench" (celeron E5200, cheap motherboard I salvaged and 2x2GB sticks) and it seemed to work fine, I downloaded the drivers, restarted and launched MSI AB to check temperatures.
oh no
So the card was at 82 degrees idle, very bad of course but I wasnt expecting it to literally have a major crash after blinking the screen a few times. I went to the little workshop I have and added a fan to it, nothing fancy, but it would help.
Success! 40C° idle and 50C° on furmark after 15 minutes, seemed stable and great... But could it do more? I thought to myself, I opened MSI AB and the Heaven benchmark, raising the bars as much as possible. I was able to get the sliders up until the end and it was working fine, no crashes, nothing. After a while, the screen got stuck, the card was at a mild 52C° but it wouldn't move in any way. After restarting the pc I noticed a clear difference: 8bit color at 640x480.
Oof, it seems the card went into a safe state or something, so i started to dig checking what was going on, in device manager the card reported as "vgasave", so i uninstalled that, with all the drivers and reinstalled them. The only thing slightly different was that device manager says Windows stopped the card because it stopped working (Error: 43).
I tried: - DDU in safe mode
- Reinstalling the card
- Putting it in my main pc and installing the drivers
- DDUing it in my main pc
But nothing, it seems to be rendering it in some kind of software mode, and I see some interesting artifacts, as in I can sometimes see stripes in some colors.
MSI AB of course doesn't report it but i found that down in the sensors it said it's current core clock and memory clock were 465 and 266 respectively, which are the same as stock clocks, GPU-Z reports mem and core clocks as a big fat 0Mhz and Windows keeps avoiding the card.
So what's up?
Thanks for reading.
TLDR: Overclocked shitty card > shitty card gets into safe mode > windows disables it > cant get it back up.