so blizzard fried my video card (lol)

my radeon x1600 (8 mos old) got burned out when blizzard hotpatched last thursday night (the hotfix, 1.11.2). it happened to a couple of my other guildies, and blizzard of course has said "sorry, check your warranty for replacement guidelines." i knew it had burned out when it locked up on t1.

this is happening to more and more people(from the wow tech forum), lots of people are having "hardlocks" all of the sudden and its mostly from fried video cards. which is what happened to me. i started getting random freezes in game, like really bad lag in t1, where you jerk around a lot, for 15-20seconds at a time. then eventually, hardlocks and nv4_disp errors(bsod).

im not sure if i should drop another 150$ and take the off-chance blizzard fucks me over again.

:/

exactly what did they do that fired your card? is there a post where anyone explains it?

T1 is a very very old game so that might not be the best thing to go off of. is it locking up on anything else?

yeah, check the wow tech forums. you'll see a stickied blue post called "hardlocks: gathering data".

ive also tried BF2/Sims2. same issue i have with wow. and t1 has always been a good benchmark for me :p

a lot of people are having problems since that hotfix nail bomb, but only about 1% of the population so they aren't working 24/7 on it like anything normal.

RMA the video card if it still has a warrenty. thats what i'd do anyway.

OK, here's the deal (20 years in IT; 10 of which have been in Security):

Software cannot damage hardware. Period.

The *only exception* ever recorded to this rule was a CMOS virus released by a Chinese programmer in early 2000 and all it could do was flatline your mobo's CMOS chip which was a $15 fix, presuming your warranty was expired.

Having said all that, I have no problem believing that a hotpatch corrupted your DirectX or video card drivers as that happened to me a few patches ago. Particularly an ATi card, which I also have, as WoW is "optimized" for nVidia cards.

All I had to do, which will work for you as well, was reinstall Windows and WoW and everything now works just fine.

Your video card is fine. Your installation of Windows may be hosed, however.

After a while WoW can really kick your resource's ass, especially if you've never deleted your WTB and WTF folders. My radeon 9700 pro was going nuclear hot after 5-6 months of WoW, even though nothing had changed. I was getting hard locks, slow down, and choppiness in everything.

The solution? I opened my case, and mounted a case fan with a wicked tin foil funnel to blow the shit out of the heat sink. I dropped 20 degrees within minutes, and have never crashed or locked WoW since.

I would download the omega driver set and optional control panel and monitor your vid card's heat. It's probably the problem.

error, ive done everything under the sun, including reinstall windows/wow *twice* now, roughly 8 various drivers (although i have not tried the directx reinstall, didnt know that could go corrupt. i'll have to try that before i junk my video card.).

i think wow may just have burnt out my video card after months of use and this was the final straw.


i think my lack of ram may have caused this to happen (768mb ddr2). i never found wow to be particularly hard on my video card (unlike say, HL2/sims2), so im not exactly sure.

edit: grammar

OK, here's the deal (20 years in IT; 10 of which have been in Security):

Software cannot damage hardware. Period.

The *only exception* ever recorded to this rule was a CMOS virus released by a Chinese programmer in early 2000 and all it could do was flatline your mobo's CMOS chip which was a $15 fix, presuming your warranty was expired.

Having said all that, I have no problem believing that a hotpatch corrupted your DirectX or video card drivers as that happened to me a few patches ago. Particularly an ATi card, which I also have, as WoW is "optimized" for nVidia cards.

All I had to do, which will work for you as well, was reinstall Windows and WoW and everything now works just fine.

Your video card is fine. Your installation of Windows may be hosed, however.

sure it can... you cant assume hardware is perfect. some chips may get rushed and not get fully tested under the more unusual conditions. later on someone can poke the right registers in the right sequence and cause the chip to overheat, overcurrent, etc.

and some hardware WILL fail under software control by design, like rewritting the same sector on a disk drive ... say several billion times (flushing past the cache each time).


oh and the chernoble virus you're referring to is more of a software deal. the cmos battery can be reflashed, and doesnt have to be replaced... although most people dont have the equipment to do this.

*bloops wrong thread*

sure it can... you cant assume hardware is perfect. some chips may get rushed and not get fully tested under the more unusual conditions. later on someone can poke the right registers in the right sequence and cause the chip to overheat, overcurrent, etc.

and some hardware WILL fail under software control by design, like rewritting the same sector on a disk drive ... say several billion times (flushing past the cache each time).


oh and the chernoble virus you're referring to is more of a software deal. the cmos battery can be reflashed, and doesnt have to be replaced... although most people dont have the equipment to do this.
I think you confused CMOS with BIOS
the virus he was referring to wrote garbage to your Bios if flash was enabled, thus preventing your pc from posting until you replaced the bios chip

I think you confused CMOS with BIOS
the virus he was referring to wrote garbage to your Bios if flash was enabled, thus preventing your pc from posting until you replaced the bios chip
doh, my bad... although the bios does use the cmos battery to save info. but ya, if the cmos gets fucked up the bios just goes back to the defaults. regardless, both involve software, not hardware.