Sad to say but my XfX 6600GT AGP has given up the ghost. After about a week of testing I’ve come to the conclusion it’s something to do with 3D acceleration.

Testing under Linux has been difficult. Most games I’ve found that are ‘free’ aren’t very intensive so it was hit and miss if/when it failed.

Eventually the other day though, it finally failed as soon as it started loading into GNOME. This was under Ubuntu.

To give it a good test run, I decided to install PCLinuxOS2007 on a 3rd partition as I’ve been reading some good stuff on it as a desktop distro and thought it’d give me a good chance to identify where/when/how my video card problems were occurring. More on this in my next post!

Anyway, I eventually established that the problem occurs as soon as the nVidia driver loads. I established this as PCLinuxOS was working fine (most of the time) with the nv driver, installed nvidia through apt-get and then the problems reoccured the same as under Ubuntu.

I thought it might be driver related, but alas, I tried 9755 (repo), 9754 (from nVidia site) and 100.14.06BETA (repo) and all the same.

Finally I caved and booted into Windows and same problem, the desktop loads with the lovely white boxes.

I’m not an expert on drivers, but I’m assuming here that the nVidia drivers must access some part of the card that nv open source or basic vesa drivers don’t but has failed and hence it’s been such a bitch to figure out?

I’m now waiting for XfX to return my emails about RA as the retailer wasn’t interested. The card is 14mths old and they only offer 12mth warranty.