Adventures in Video Cards (and Minecraft!)

Jan 15, 2012 00:17

Finally bought a new video card. (The old one may have been pretty decent when it was new, but now... yeah. Not so great.)

Old card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814128184 (Don't remember where we actually bought it from. Also the cooling fans on it are shot now.)
New card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500221 (Actually bought it from TigerDirect for cheaper, but whatever.)

Did like it said to do. Uninstalled the old Forceware drivers (And I mean OLD, seems drivers for the FX series don't go past FW 96.85), then ran Driver Cleaner Pro set to nvidia like nvidia suggested.

Shut down, removed the old card. Put the new one in. So far so good.

Installed the latest "WHQL"(Recommended) drivers (FW 285.62). Restarted again. Things seemed to be working so far. Went to youtube and loaded a 1080p video fullscreened. Worked great. (The old card often had trouble even with non-fullscreened 720p.)

Went to play a little Minecraft. Hit "log in", it logged in, and then closed, leaving a hs_err_pidxxxx.log file on the desktop. Tried again (repeatedly), it did it again (repeatedly). Tried uninstalling/reboot/DriverCleaner/reboot/reinstalling the drivers. No luck. Tried renaming .minecraft to .minecraft_BAK so it would re-install it, no luck. Tried Spoutcraft (haven't been using it because it needs to update to 1.1 still), no luck.

The log files were all showing
# Problematic frame:
# C [nvoglv32.DLL+0x69cb45]
and looking that up, and reading people trying all the things I'd already tried, one site suggested downgrading the drivers. And new drivers were one of the changes, so... I downloaded FW 280.26 (the previous "WHQL"(Recommended) driver), and did the whole uninstall/reboot/DriverCleaner/reboot/reinstall thing again, except with the 280.26 Forceware driver for the last step instead of FW 285.62 - and this time, Minecraft works fine! Better than before even, as far as I can tell!

(I'm tempted to get a third 1GB stick of PC3200/DDR400 and max out the ram this board can handle, see if that helps any too... Might even have one sitting around in a spare computer, I'll have to look...)
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