My Nvidia 9800GTX+ have become all messed up with weird colorstripes on the screen. And now won't start Windows XP, instead a bluescreen appears stating something is wrong with nv4_disp.dll (The display drivers, right?). I managed to start XP in failsafe mode, where I tried to reinstall the drivers but that didn't help (The colors are also present when there are no display drivers installed at all).

It's very weird, because I have been playing New Vegas more than 24 hours in total without any major issues other than the ordinary random crashes (Saving often is vital).
It all started after speaking to Lily in Jacobstown. She started talking and then red lines appeared followed by a blue screen which looked like bacterias seen in a microscope. Then no response. I rebooted my PC without any troubles, started New Vegas again, thinking it was just a more serious crash. No problems in game, until I spoke to Lily where the same thing happened but without the bacteria picture. Rebooted again, and now my graphic card seems to have been permanently damaged just by speaking to Lily.

If you installed the latest drivers, perhaps nvidia broke the fan control again so you gfx card overheated. Check the temp on your card and use Evga Precision or something to up the fan speed manually if it doesn't change automaticly.

I didn't have the latest drivers installed, before I tried changing the drivers after the GPU got damaged. I was playing with semi-new drivers (I don't remember which version, but they where not any more than 1 or 2 month old. And I haven't expirienced any problems with the fanspeed with those drivers.

you should open run and type "dxdiag" without quotes. see what your system has for drivers and run the tests under the display tab "Direct3D". Hopefully your gpu is ok... hardware does give up the ghost....maybe it's upgrade time?

I had the 9800 GTX+ card and wasn't even playing any games on it when it started doing the same exact thing....

it was only a couple of days out of the box...
I would be doing something completely random like just browsing the net or using a program and
the screen would fill up with weird brightly colored pixels and the PC would crash..

I tried for months to figure out how to fix it and finally just replaced the board with a different board and have had no problems since...

I remember reading on a few of the tech forums that some of the 9800 GTX+ boards were faulty from the factory (GPU or onboard ram, I don't remember which now..)
and they recommended to send it back for a replacement...

M

Well the weird stripes on your screen.. do these show up on your bios startup? (like a second after turning your computer on)
Or do they appear when windows loads?

I'll explain : If this happens on the bios startup : It cannot be any drivers as they are not loaded yet, it means your GPU died due to overheating.

If however this happens when windows should be loading it's another story and driver related, start windows in "safe mode", uninstall the Nvidia driver completely (find a guide on the internet).
Now reinstall the latest (non-test) drivers, so you can assess if it starts stable, and take it form there.

just curious were you using the .dll fix?

Yeah if it shows up in bios, its either the screen or gpu.

If you suspect drivers download new drivers, uninstall the old drivers, reboot into safe mode, stop windows from installing drivers if it wants to, run driver sweeper or similar program to remove traces of old drivers. Reboot into normal mode and install new drivers.

The screen is also messed up on BIOS screen, damn it!
So I guess the card is done then.

But I still think it is very weird it didn't happen randomly, but at the exact same event (speaking to Lily).

No, I didn't use the dll fix

Overheating is my guess then.

Any chance you could hook up the screen on another computer to make absolutely 100% sure its the card?
Just to make sure you dont endup screwing yourself over on accident by getting a new card.. lol.

I have another PC I could test it on. But i'll do that tomorrow. Because it is getting late in Denmark so I don't want to mess around with that now

But guys, watch out when speaking to Lily, she is rigged to overheat you GPU! xD

Sounds like it's time for an RMA as long as the warranty is still valid.

Also, games don't break hardware. (Ignore if you were joking.) The hardware had to have a flaw to start. (Including drivers. RE: Aforementioned driver that made cards overheat.)

There ain't anything for me to do about it anyway (warranty expired). Other than i'm ditching Nvidia. It seems their cards has a habit of making the stripes. I spoke to a friend who expirienced the same red stripes with his 8800GTX some time ago. And my fathers 7950GX2 also did stripes (Altough not the same stripes) and he isn't even gaming.

Often the card has nothing wrong with it, but the cooling ability of the case is what killed it. A card can't cool itself properly if the case is full of hot air that isn't being expelled. Seeing as you were running a 9800 which is actually a very cool-running card (especially if you run the smaller 40nm die version), I would investigate the temperatures inside your case immediately. If your temps are high all around, adding fans will extend the life of your components (and, who knows, it may give your graphics card new life once it can cool down). At the very least, it will prevent your new graphics card from meeting the same fate.

My case is completely open on the side because it has bad ventilation. and i had cleaned it from dust not long ago.

I recommend running speed fan in the background with logging activated so you can track your temps during all usage:

http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php

I HAVE HAD THE SAME THING HAPPEN TO ME! I'm so upset. I have 2 EVGA Nvidia 9800 GTX 512MB graphic cards SLI together. Once tried going around the village to find people to help the guy in the garage to fight the gang it crashed. I have completely uninstalled every file to the drivers for my graphic cards in safe mode and I still get the red lines from time to time when my BIOS starts up. It is actually very random. I agree that the graphic cards must now be over heating. I think something screwed up the BIOS in the Nvidia cards. It is too weird that this happened to me too. I have had these cards since 2008 and had no problems. I also tried updating the driver to the 260.99 version and it does nothing. I tried looking for a BIOS update for my Nvidia cards and there is nothing even tho I downloaded something from Nvidia that can update my BIOS if I have the proper BIOS file downloaded. I now have to buy a new computer because my computer can no longer function. I am seriously upset with Bethesda for breaking my video cards and causing me to buy a new computer. If they are reading this I can prove it to them. They can have my broken computer and I can fly to their building and show them how it destroyed my video cards. Another weird thing is that Fallout 3 worked fine on this very same computer. I will be looking for Bethesda's contact info and call them about this.

Actually I also noticed that speaking to super mutants causes excess GPU heat, my fan spins up quite a bit when I talked to Lily, and again when I talked to Marcus. Nothing it couldn't handle, though, certainly didn't get to 100% fan speed (285 GTX).

My 8 series burnt out a while back, and I've heard that some of the 9 series also had problems with heat. On top of that there was a driver released a while back that broke the fan automation, resulting in fans being stuck at ~15% at all times. You should check what driver version you're running, as those drivers fried a number of cards and were removed from the site shortly after.

AND IT MEANS THE GPU WAS BORKED BEFORE AND JUST HAPPEN TO DIE WHILE PLAYING FALLOUT!

Can we please stop yelling at each other now?

Game software does not break hardware! Hardware gets old/well used and simply dies, or it had a design/manufacturing flaw straight out of the factory that just took time to rear it's head.

Bethesda is no more responsible for your faulting GPU than I am. Sorry, but it's true.

Umm... I don't know where you have been, but software can break hardware. Try reading a CEH or CISSP book. You can send machine code to a CPU and cause something to burn up or over work itself. China and the US hack into each other and send machine code to the CPU to gain control or destroy a computer. Software can definitely cause hardware to break and my CISSP instructor did it in one of my classes 2 years ago to a computer in the room. These GPUs have their on CPUs and the software send machine code to it all the time. You can have a application demand more and accidentally exploit the software of the graphic card to tell the CPU to do something that it shouldn't do. Bethesda Softworks should have tested this, known about it, and if anything... notify all Nvidia users what their software DOESN'T work on a Nvidia 9800 GTX. If it says it should work on a Nvidia 9800 GTX then it should work with a Nvidia 9800 GTX.

Except we aren't talking about Bethesda trying to hack someone's computer here. The most that could happen is like what blizzard did and forgot to cap the frames, which caused the GPU to render thousands of frames per second, but that isn't the case here, as we are lucky to get more then 5 with NPCs running around.

Yeah easy fix:

• Take the gpu cooler off,
  
• clean the card,
  
• insulate the plastic connectors with foil,
  
• bake in the oven at 490 degree's F for 7 minutes on an insulated aluminum cookie sheet.
  
• Then remove from oven, cool as rapidly as possible with a fan with room temp air.
  
• reassemble with new T.I.M.

Enjoy the new found graphics card love for about a year till it does again. EVERY nVidia GPU (8800GTX 8800GT, 8800GTS 640mb, 9800GT, and even my 280GTX) in my house has DIED this same way. It's not game related. All Lived through the oven baking to continue to function just fine. The shortest lived oven GPU was about 4 months after it was baked, but that was likely my fault as it was only baked at 390 Degrees on accident.

If you burn your house down or fry your already broken card, well blame FO:NV... If it works, I accept payment in Guinness only!

Having the case open isn't the best solution -

but I don't know how much room you have to work with your case configuration.

The best setup is to establish an 'air tunnel' through your PC with the case sealed up as tight as you can make it - a nice large intake in the front and few fans in the back expelling. Then the GPU/CPU/Northbridge fans just do their own thing with the air that's passing through.

On a side note I had to RMA a dead 8800GTS 512 and EVGA sent me a 9800GTX+ 512. The first one they sent me was DOA. The second is doing great but I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop...the 9800's have a bad reputation....

your card's death is likely neither your or New Vegas' fault. Your cards number was up.

that is hilarious. maybe save this for the off-warranty cards right.

Of-course they are not hacking. I was just explaining that you have to understand how software uses commands that eventual turn into machine code using bits to tell the CPU what to do. The most that an application can do is a lot more then just caping the frames. look up www.exploit-db.com these are exploits that are happening everyday that normal people do to exploit all different applications. No matter what the software is there is a flaw in it somewhere and another software can cause it to have problems. Most of the time it is just minor things and the software can correct itself. It happens all the time though. I have done testing, coding, hacking, doing buffer overflows to gain control of a CPU. It's a amazing what you see happen. If you don't have a problem with Nvidia 9800 GTX crashing then please stop posting things that don't help. Please write possible solutions. My whole point was that I have the same problem as the person who started this thread. Since I have tried many things and no one can solve it or give any answer to it at all AND other people who have the same hardware as I do are having the same problem as me after playing this game (which I really was excited to play), it can't be left to "It's not software because software doesn't cause damage to hardware". The statement is not true and mis-directs the underlying problem. Fallout New Vegas demanded certain things from our graphic card that it couldn't handle causing it to mishandle the commands sent to the CPU which in turn caused overheating or the fan to turn off or a corruption in the BIOS which then makes the graphic card constantly have the same problem over and over even when the BIOS starts up. The weird thing is that once you get into safe mode then the display will stay fine without any problems. Only in this mode is it stable and no where else. I wish there is a way to flash the BIOS of the graphic card to update it, but I can't find any files that are updates to the BIOS.