Clementine was lucky enough to get yet another unplanned upgrade recently, this time a new video card.  Why?  Because her previous one failed (specifically, it blew a capacitor).  I’m a big fan of the card that was previously in Clementine — an EVGA GeForce 7100GS.  It’s an Nvidia chipset; it’s a silent, fanless card; and it’s not super powerful, since I don’t game, so it was very reasonably priced.

But, all of a sudden one day, it started acting up.  While using Clementine, you would randomly get multi-colored pixelization, and after a while of the pixelization, the machine would hang.  From the beginning I suspected this was the video card failing, but I did try other easy things first — update driver, update Windows, reduce resolution, turn off Aero… the last two helped prolong the time before Clementine would hang, but nothing actually fixed the problem.

So I ordered a more modern, but very similar card to replace the failing one — an EVGA GeForce 210.  Still nVidia, still silent, and still modestly powerful but well-priced.  Since it’s four years later, it’s significantly more powerful than the 7100GS it replaces.  It also adds an HDMI port in place of the S-Video port my previous card had.  Great card so far.  And it’s a PCI Express 2.0 card, so my current motherboard is holding it back, but I’m planning to replace the motherboard next year, so this card will grow with that upgrade as well.

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Posted in Clementine by Greg Leedberg No Comments Yet