Cheap old generic graphics card is a Nvidia knockoff?, was theculprit for BSOD

On Mon, 20 Feb 2017 16:32:24 -0500, Paul wrote:

| Larc wrote:
| On Mon, 20 Feb 2017 12:56:45 -0500, Paul wrote:
|
| | RayLopez99 wrote:
| | On Sunday, February 19, 2017 at 5:32:16 PM UTC-5, Paul wrote:
| |
| | Paul
| |
| | Wow, thanks Paul. I think few people in the world have your expertise. I'll get a new video card, as I said in the other thread, just to get a little extra capability on this old PC, probably the fanless one as I don't do any heavy gaming (I just play chess online, which is not a graphics heavy game) on the PC, and for video games for my gf we use PS4, which I understand is actually an analog system that uses --ironically--a video card GPU for powering the system (so I've heard).
| |
| | RL
| |
| | I just like to have a few options, and having
| | some video cards around makes it easier. My
| | $40 card no longer gets driver updates, and
| | I'm just waiting for Microsoft to bust things :-)
|
| That must really be an old card or not NVidia. I'm still using a GeForce 9500GT I
| bought in 2008 and there are current Windows 10 drivers for it. A Radeon HD 4850 I
| bought in 2009 hasn't been updated by AMD since Windows 8. So the earlier NVidia
| card I paid $65 for is still supported, but the $100 AMD card isn't. I've bought 3
| video cards since, but probably don't need to say they all have NVidia chips.
|
| Larc
|
| Well, take a look in Device Manager. If it says Microsoft
| Basic Display Adapter, then you don't have a Win10 driver.
| You'd be using the fallback VESA driver.
|
| The free upgrade from Win7 to Win10 would block if the
| video card driver was missing in action. But if you download
| a Win10 DVD, you should be able to install Win10 with just
| the VESA drive for company.
|
| In this example, not even the el-cheapo 210 has a driver.
| The ones here start at 420. The 1050 isn't listed here, because
| this driver was released before the 1000 series came out.
|
| http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...ts.aspx/86510/

That's not the driver series I use for my 9500GT, but this one:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...x/112596/en-us

That does include the 210 and 205. Even the 100 series. It isn't updated as
frequently as the main drivers (maybe only 1 or 2 times a year), but it at least
keeps older cards working.

| On my ATI 6450, I got one driver, before support was cut off.
| And that's what I keep loading into Win10, for any Win10
| related work. There was a single Crimson driver for my card
| (CCC2), which repairs the defective in-box (CCC) driver that
| came with Win10. So that's an example of "enough support for
| the time being". All it would take is one OS burp or
| fart, and I'd be back to unaccelerated video.
|
| The OS will run with unaccelerated video. But sooner or later,
| something will happen that you'll notice. If you had the
| Basic Display Adapter, then Adobe Flash and Firefox hardware
| acceleration would be disabled too. Which might be
| a good thing - who knows...
|
| On my typing machine, I keep the older card installed
| because it allows me to use anything from Win2K to Win8.1.
| But it doesn't quite manage to make it to Win10. On the newer
| machine, the 6450 covers from WinXP to Win10, with Win10
| being "lucky" to get the Crimson driver. I wasn't supposed to
| get that, but when checking release notes, I found it was included.
| I was basically pretty happen to get something that was
| defect-free (no more CCC-related error messages at startup).
|
| If I shift up to newer cards, then support for quite a
| few older OSes will disappear.

I get all my NVidia card drivers directly from NVidia, never Microsoft or even the
card manufacturer. I start with this page:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

That tracks down whichever driver series is applicable.

When I first installed my latest (GTX 1050), Windows 10 slipped in drivers that
weren't the most current before I had time to install what I had downloaded. That
got corrected quickly. They had also thrown in everything including the kitchen
sink. I want only the graphics driver.

Larc

Larc wrote:


That's not the driver series I use for my 9500GT, but this one:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/drive...x/112596/en-us

That does include the 210 and 205. Even the 100 series. It isn't updated as
frequently as the main drivers (maybe only 1 or 2 times a year), but it at least
keeps older cards working.

I get all my NVidia card drivers directly from NVidia, never Microsoft or even the
card manufacturer. I start with this page:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

That tracks down whichever driver series is applicable.

When I first installed my latest (GTX 1050), Windows 10 slipped in drivers that
weren't the most current before I had time to install what I had downloaded. That
got corrected quickly. They had also thrown in everything including the kitchen
sink. I want only the graphics driver.

Larc

Your first link there is a surprise. As I'd heard at
one point, that the 8800 was our of support. I mean, your
link even includes the 8400GS, a card which is still for
sale, and one I would have incorrectly told people to avoid.

I wonder if this was to keep NVidia partners happy ?

So now RayLopez99 has another choice to put in
his old PC :-)

Paul

On Monday, February 20, 2017 at 6:55:50 PM UTC-5, Paul wrote:

So now RayLopez99 has another choice to put in
his old PC :-)

Paul

I ended up getting this one, for a decent price (about $50):

Zotac PCI Express Video Card ZT-71301-20L by ZOTAC

Chipset: NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
Core Clock: 954 MHz
Video Memory: 1GB DDR3
Memory Clock: 1600 MHz
Memory Interface: 64-bit
Bus: PCI-Express 2.0

Benchmark: 654 for Zotac GeForce GT 710 (this in "http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/mid_range_gpus.html" Mid-Range Video cards)

And the video card driver program, downloaded direct from Zotac, does support 32 bit Windows 10, so I'm happy.

RL

On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:43:11 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote:

I installed the new video card, a fanless NVIDIA GeForce GT710, but now the problem is the audio driver of this card apparently on occasion causes the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. It might be related to the Audio file.

Hence I disabled the audio drivers for this video card, see a suggestion he http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html


SOmebody suggested playing around with BIOS to reset the 'database' (I guess by shorting the battery on the BIOS mobo) but I don't want to do that just yet.

Question: disable the apparently offending driver then remove driver, or just disable it? Also it seems NVIDIA has a nasty habit of reinstalling a driver everytime there is an update, so perhaps removing the auto-update is another answer.

Sigh...you would think after so many years these driver programmers would have their act together.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:




On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:43:11 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote: I installed the new video card, a fanless NVIDIA GeForce GT710, but now the problem is the audio driver of this card apparently on occasion causes the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. It might be related to the Audio file. Hence I disabled the audio drivers for this video card, see a suggestion he http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html SOmebody suggested playing around with BIOS to reset the 'database' (I guess by shorting the battery on the BIOS mobo) but I don't want to do that just yet. Question: disable the apparently offending driver then remove driver, or just disable it?


How much gone do you want it?




Also it seems NVIDIA has a nasty habit of reinstalling a driver everytime there is an update, so perhaps removing the auto-update is another answer. Sigh...you would think after so many years these driver programmers would have their act together. RL

On Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 10:31:21 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:



On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:43:11 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote:

I installed the new video card, a fanless NVIDIA GeForce GT710, but now the problem is the audio driver of this card apparently on occasion causes the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. It might be related to the Audio file.

Hence I disabled the audio drivers for this video card, see a suggestion he http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html


SOmebody suggested playing around with BIOS to reset the 'database' (I guess by shorting the battery on the BIOS mobo) but I don't want to do that just yet.

Question: disable the apparently offending driver then remove driver, or just disable it?



How much gone do you want it?



Not sure if it was audio after all, but it was definitely the card. I uninstalled the card and the errors such as "DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION" and "Application [Microsoft Edge] has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware" errors, which caused system to freeze up and BSOD on occasion, have gone away.

Can improperly seated video card cause this? It's because of the way the case and mobo are fit together, it's possible that the graphics card is not 100% seated. On the other hand, you would think if the card is not seated it would not at all work.

In any event, this entire episode was a disappointment not to mention a waste of $50 (I doubt I'll return the video card, too much hassle).

I am now using the 'on-board' video and it seems to be working, and I also uninstalled all Nvidia programs.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 10:31:21 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:



On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:43:11 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote:

I installed the new video card, a fanless NVIDIA GeForce GT710, but now the problem is the audio driver of this card apparently on occasion causes the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. It might be related to the Audio file.

Hence I disabled the audio drivers for this video card, see a suggestion he http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html


SOmebody suggested playing around with BIOS to reset the 'database' (I guess by shorting the battery on the BIOS mobo) but I don't want to do that just yet.

Question: disable the apparently offending driver then remove driver, or just disable it?



How much gone do you want it?



Not sure if it was audio after all, but it was definitely the card. I uninstalled the card and the errors such as "DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION" and "Application [Microsoft Edge] has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware" errors, which caused system to freeze up and BSOD on occasion, have gone away.

Can improperly seated video card cause this?

I would look at the status of each of your "hardware devices" (assuming
you are using Windows), and see what it says about the hardware and
driver, if anything (it should definitely be on the list!) Good luck!

Bill


It's because of the way the case and mobo are fit together, it's possible that the graphics card is not 100% seated. On the other hand, you would think if the card is not seated it would not at all work.

In any event, this entire episode was a disappointment not to mention a waste of $50 (I doubt I'll return the video card, too much hassle).

I am now using the 'on-board' video and it seems to be working, and I also uninstalled all Nvidia programs.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 10:31:21 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
RayLopez99 wrote:



On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 4:43:11 PM UTC-5, RayLopez99 wrote:

I installed the new video card, a fanless NVIDIA GeForce GT710, but now the problem is the audio driver of this card apparently on occasion causes the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. It might be related to the Audio file.

Hence I disabled the audio drivers for this video card, see a suggestion he http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html


SOmebody suggested playing around with BIOS to reset the 'database' (I guess by shorting the battery on the BIOS mobo) but I don't want to do that just yet.

Question: disable the apparently offending driver then remove driver, or just disable it?



How much gone do you want it?



Not sure if it was audio after all, but it was definitely the card. I uninstalled the card and the errors such as "DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION" and "Application [Microsoft Edge] has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware" errors, which caused system to freeze up and BSOD on occasion, have gone away.

Can improperly seated video card cause this? It's because of the way the case and mobo are fit together, it's possible that the graphics card is not 100% seated. On the other hand, you would think if the card is not seated it would not at all work.

In any event, this entire episode was a disappointment not to mention a waste of $50 (I doubt I'll return the video card, too much hassle).

I am now using the 'on-board' video and it seems to be working, and I also uninstalled all Nvidia programs.

RL

The BIOS shouldn't have anything to do with it.

In the AGP era, there were more things that could go wrong.
PCI Express on the other hand, has similarities to PCI rather
than to AGP. Interrupts can be carried as regular PCI Express
packets. It's really quite a clean design.

The BIOS "discovers" the hardware on each POST, and plans an
address space for the hardware. Early in PCI Express era,
the BIOS used to make mistakes, and set up both a cached and
uncached address space for a video card. But later BIOS
designs fixed that, and a 1GB card would use only 1GB of
address space.

The x16 lane interface, can initialize 1,4,8, or 16 lanes (at least).
That means if the upper five lanes weren't touching, the card
could initialize as x8. Similarly, if lane 5 is dirty or open circuit,
the card could initialize as x4.

The cards also have some sort of lane reversal, but I've not seen
an explanation of why. It might mean the lanes can be discovered
from the lane 15 end, rather than the lane 0 end.

So not every open circuit, means the interconnect is dead.

The slot has power connections, and it would help if those pins
touched. I doubt the card would be very happy without the 3.3V
pins. The slot also has card present detect contacts, a couple
of them at least, but I don't know if any hard-wired behavior
is related to those or not.

*******

I can see one Tomshardware thread, where a person just
tried some older drivers, and the card started to work.
Now, you had an NVidia card previously, and now have another
NVidia card - perhaps the old driver has something to do
with the mis-behavior. The thing I don't know now,
is whether there is a reliable NVidia driver cleaner
(something to be run after a driver uninstall from
Programs and Features control panel). There used to be
such a thing long ago, but I doubt the one I used was
kept up to date.

The new driver you downloaded (or used off the CD),
should really be "house-cleaning". In particular, on
an uninstall from Programs and Features, there should
be an option to "remove settings", so nothing of
the installed driver is remembered. That's about the
closest you can get to a cleaner, without using a
cleaner.

DPC is Deferred Procedure Call. When there is an interrupt,
the interrupt is serviced at interrupt level, but the
driver schedules an event at normal priority to finish
the work involved in interrupt servicing. The Deferred
Procedure Calls are gueued up for service. If the OS
noticed the DPCs crossing a water-mark, it increases
the servicing priority, in an attempt to clear the
backlog of DPCs in the queue.

I presume if a DPC does not get processed, there is some
other kind of check. I'm surprised to hear it is a
Watchdog (an actual timer), as it really needs to be
an analysis of the queue contents to determine if
the system is falling too far behind. To get into
that state, implies a very high interrupt rate, without
relief.

You could use Process Monitor from Sysinternals.com and
look at the DPCs there.

While it could (somehow) be sound related, I would
sooner believe this is an artifact from the driver
you were using with the previous card. But if your
previous card dies, there isn't always an opportunity
to remove the old driver.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html

I had a system here, with a Matrox, an ATI, and an NVidia
card. And like a cowboy, I just left the drivers in on each
"card upgrade". Well, when the third card was installed,
I couldn't get AGP DMA/DIME to work. No-way and no-how. I
tried everything I could think of. I ran cleaners. I sacrificed
a chicken dinner. Nothing helped. I ended up reinstalling the
OS as my punishment. Everything was fine after that. Now,
I'm a bit more careful to remove drivers before changing
cards.

Paul

On Thu, 23 Feb 2017 22:30:32 -0500, Bill wrote:

| Also it seems NVIDIA has a nasty habit of reinstalling a driver everytime there is an update, so perhaps removing the auto-update is another answer.

Manual installation is the only good option, IMO. Then you can uncheck anything
other than the basic graphics driver you don't want installed. If there are older
versions of NVIDIA drivers on your PC that you don't want, clean install gets rid of
all the old stuff and doesn't install anything new that isn't checked.

Larc

On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 12:24:06 AM UTC-5, Paul wrote:


The BIOS shouldn't have anything to do with it.

In the AGP era, there were more things that could go wrong.
PCI Express on the other hand, has similarities to PCI rather
than to AGP. Interrupts can be carried as regular PCI Express
packets. It's really quite a clean design.

The BIOS "discovers" the hardware on each POST, and plans an
address space for the hardware. Early in PCI Express era,
the BIOS used to make mistakes, and set up both a cached and
uncached address space for a video card. But later BIOS
designs fixed that, and a 1GB card would use only 1GB of
address space.

The x16 lane interface, can initialize 1,4,8, or 16 lanes (at least).
That means if the upper five lanes weren't touching, the card
could initialize as x8. Similarly, if lane 5 is dirty or open circuit,
the card could initialize as x4.

The cards also have some sort of lane reversal, but I've not seen
an explanation of why. It might mean the lanes can be discovered
from the lane 15 end, rather than the lane 0 end.

So not every open circuit, means the interconnect is dead.

The slot has power connections, and it would help if those pins
touched. I doubt the card would be very happy without the 3.3V
pins. The slot also has card present detect contacts, a couple
of them at least, but I don't know if any hard-wired behavior
is related to those or not.

*******

I can see one Tomshardware thread, where a person just
tried some older drivers, and the card started to work.
Now, you had an NVidia card previously, and now have another
NVidia card - perhaps the old driver has something to do
with the mis-behavior. The thing I don't know now,
is whether there is a reliable NVidia driver cleaner
(something to be run after a driver uninstall from
Programs and Features control panel). There used to be
such a thing long ago, but I doubt the one I used was
kept up to date.

The new driver you downloaded (or used off the CD),
should really be "house-cleaning". In particular, on
an uninstall from Programs and Features, there should
be an option to "remove settings", so nothing of
the installed driver is remembered. That's about the
closest you can get to a cleaner, without using a
cleaner.

DPC is Deferred Procedure Call. When there is an interrupt,
the interrupt is serviced at interrupt level, but the
driver schedules an event at normal priority to finish
the work involved in interrupt servicing. The Deferred
Procedure Calls are gueued up for service. If the OS
noticed the DPCs crossing a water-mark, it increases
the servicing priority, in an attempt to clear the
backlog of DPCs in the queue.

I presume if a DPC does not get processed, there is some
other kind of check. I'm surprised to hear it is a
Watchdog (an actual timer), as it really needs to be
an analysis of the queue contents to determine if
the system is falling too far behind. To get into
that state, implies a very high interrupt rate, without
relief.

You could use Process Monitor from Sysinternals.com and
look at the DPCs there.

While it could (somehow) be sound related, I would
sooner believe this is an artifact from the driver
you were using with the previous card. But if your
previous card dies, there isn't always an opportunity
to remove the old driver.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id...od-nvidia.html

I had a system here, with a Matrox, an ATI, and an NVidia
card. And like a cowboy, I just left the drivers in on each
"card upgrade". Well, when the third card was installed,
I couldn't get AGP DMA/DIME to work. No-way and no-how. I
tried everything I could think of. I ran cleaners. I sacrificed
a chicken dinner. Nothing helped. I ended up reinstalling the
OS as my punishment. Everything was fine after that. Now,
I'm a bit more careful to remove drivers before changing
cards.

Paul

Thank you Paul! I will give a bit more information. Keep in mind I have an old Core2Duo tower from 2008 (as I recall) that ran Vista, and now WIn10 (clean reinstall of Windows 10, including buying a new Win10 32-bit license, as you could do the free upgrade from Vista to Win10)

0. I retried the Nvidia new card by reinstalling it, they do have a "clean reinstall" checkbox, and this time I did not add the HDMI Nvidia sound drivers, and still got problems right away (within say 10 viewings of a YouTube video; it was not immediate but nearly so)

1. I removed the new card by Nvidia, removed the new card software (went back to the old Intel 'on-board' graphics chip), and I think Nvidia did in fact remove everything, aka 'clean housekeeping'.

2. I tried downloading a newer Intel 82945G chip driver, since Device Manager says I have version 1.0 (which is for Vista and maybe Win7) using this tool form Intel: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...rt/detect.html

3. The program failed to install any newer version of chipset device software, despite finding (as expected) I had old versions of the chipset device drivers. Apparently (from the Error Log file) it could not guarantee a 'rollback' so it aborted. I will try it again (right after I post this message) and let you know if there's any difference the second time around.

4. Now, on rare occasion (say one in every 50 viewings of YouTube) I *still* get a BSOD and some cryptic comment about the video driver in the BSOD screen (which annoyingly only lasts about 30 seconds so you have to be quick to write down the error, and yes, I'm aware there are programs to read these BDOD dump files, I used to have one, but I'm too lazy to get one now). But since I don't do any 'real work' on this machine anymore, it's not a big deal.

5. It seems to me that hardware is tied to software no matter how much Microsoft may officially claim otherwise. What I mean is this: this hardware is from 2010. It was designed for "Vista". When Win7 came along, of course you could upgrade to Win7 with relatively no problems, but when Windows 10 came, the link between the hardware and the software attenuated so much that it's now problematic. I firmly believe this, despite what posters may say (and I can predict their arguments: 'Yeah, I've run x486 on Windows 7 --Yes I did that too, or was that XP? I forget but it was quite a stretch for the h/w--and with some modifications I can run them on Windows 10'. But I'm talking about the center mass of the bell-shaped curve, 1 std. dev, I bet it's hard to do that in general.

This whole episode convinces me that you should buy a burnt-in system from a reputable dealer (this tower was from a 'fly-by-night' low-price Bangkok Thai computer shop, using the cheapest equipment: I've already replaced the power supply, put in new hard drives (I finally went the SSD route, now that the technology is more mature, and am pleased), extra cooling fans. But when the graphics card, which was 512k or so VRAM, failed, the dimensions of the new card, being slightly bigger on the perpendicular to the PCI-E slot dimension, made the new card either very slightly less fitting (the pin contacts issue), or, more probably, the Nvidia drivers, written for modern hardware, are incompatible with this old 2008 ASRock Conroe 1333-D667 mobo (which I think came out in 2007). Using modern drivers with ten year old hardware is not good, agree?

My followup question, which will save me a separate thread, but I'll also start a separate thread: I want to buy a laptop for YouTube and Skype and Social Media purposes, lightweight, for my girlfriend (who is into that stuff big time), and I want it relatively top-of-the-line, willing to pay USD 1000 for it, what to buy? Lightweight and from a reputable dealer, since I believe hardware has to be integrated. I don't want to buy from the local national PC chain store in the area (I'm posting from Washington DC at the moment). I'm even willing to consider Apple corporation (for the first time ever). Any suggestions appreciated.

RL