[Dapper Dan]

This started a couple of weeks ago intermittently, now it's hosed completely.

X was working fine until I did a reboot. At the very beginning Dell splash screen, I get a series of flashing white vertical stripes that doesn't go away. I can't log in because all I have is a black screen with white vertical stripes

I ssh'ed this box from another computer, which is where I'm posting from now, and forwarded X. The graphics are perfect on the client computer running the server's OS. I ran top and "X" is eating up CPU like it's going out of style! It's steady around 98 to 99% on the problem computer.

Since it was running fine before I rebooted, and now is screwed up, I'm led to believe it's a temperature problem associated with the video card.

Do y'all think I'm on the right track?

[egorgry]

very possible. I had tnt2 card and the fan blew up I had a problem with X locking up. I don't remember if X was cpu hungry though?? I'd bet it's a hardware issue... Nothing else changed, right?

[Dapper Dan]

I just lifted the hood and my Geforce4 Ti 4200 SE 128 MB DDR was hotter'n four hells!

Yep, it was the fan.

I got it spinning again and everything is back to normal. Can you change out fans on these things? How do you go about doing that?

[egorgry]

You can change out the fans. just buy the fan for your card or an after market one it's pretty easy to do.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductList.jsp?ThirdCategoryCode=012204

[Dapper Dan]

I think my video card got too hot and is hosed. I'm gonna buy a new one. Anyone have recommendations for the latest greatest hotshot Nvidia gaming card that will work without trouble?

[egorgry]

I got a BFG OC geforce6800 "vanilla" 128mb ram, works no problems. BFG is a great american company that overclocks the cards out of the box. They come with real quality memory and fan/heatsinks. I strongly recommend teh company. Plus they give you a full retail version of farcry.
http://www.bfgtech.com/