How do you know that the blue screen indicates a video driver has caused an infinite loop?  (Maybe this
is off-topic for this thread.)  I mean that if it is doing the same thing over and over, then, of course,
it is in an infinite loop that can be hardware-interrupted out of; usually "infinite loop" suggest
something that the computer is trapped in, with interrupts not working.

All the video cards that I remember using have worked without anything but the default driver supplied by
the operating system  (I don't remember if any I have used worked only in safe mode or at low
resolution - the latter, I believe.)  Did you try running for any length of time with no add-on driver?

My questions are more for my interest - I don't think they can offer much help to your problem.

I think that you most certainly have identified the problem as video card, driver, or - a long shot - the
slot that the card is plugged into, likely an AGP slot.  (Have you tried another card in the same slot?)

Dean

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 11:33 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Video board problem


I started having problems with my Win XP freezing and even blue screens
indicating that the video driver had caused an infinite loop. I upgraded the
drivers (latest ones dated Dec 05), but problems continued. Rolled the
drivers back to some old ones and still the same problem. The video board is
a Gigabyte GV-RX60X128V based on the ATI Radeon X600 XT chipset.

By installing a completely clean Win XP Pro as an alternate boot, I got the
same problems. Eliminated RAM as a problem by doing swaps and still had
failures. By switching to the on-motherboard video the problems went away.
It appears that I have identified the video board as being defective and
have requested an RMA from Gigabyte.

Here is my question to the list. How does the video processor cause the
system crash of the OS? To me it seems a very poorly designed OS if a video
processor can cause the OS to lose control. Of course, Microsoft gave up
much of NT stability when they incorporated the video into the OS with the
release of NT 4.0 - I still don't see how the hardware causes the crash, but
it does.

Thank you, and happy new year.

Peter

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com