[plug] TNT2 and console weirdness...

[Dennis Plester]

Trevor wrote:

"On the same troublesome Lab image I'm setting up, the PCs have TNT2 cards.
Running X4.0.2, if I Ctrl-Alt-F1 to go to the text console, the text
character
set is all garbled. Switching between the X server and text console doesn't
seem to fix it, but restarting the X server DOES seem to fix it, at least
for a
while.

Does anyone know what's going on here? (I'm new to nvidia cards and their
issues...)"


I had a TNT2 (Diamond V770) that was producing garbled text screens for
quite a while, but it wasn't obvious except in Linux on a text console. I
suspect the problem had been there for a long time, but in Windows it didn't
show itself (as I rarely called up full screen text mode). The problem was
eventually tracked down to overheating. I don't think that this is your
problem, but the symptoms were remarkably similar. I would jump to a
console, to find it had scrambled characters. I'd restart the PC, or
sometimes just X, and the consoles would be OK, but over time they would
start to deteriorate. It got to the point where I'd be editing something at
the console, and when I would check my file prior to saving, I couldn't tell
if I was looking at typos, or just mixed up characters. In some cases it
would show character substitution, and other times, garbled characters.
Later, it started dropping pixels in graphics modes, including in windows.

I replaced the card under warranty and the problem went away. Some Nvidia
cards can have problems with some of the text video modes. Even more recent
Geforces will produce strange characters in 80 x 50 text mode, but are fine
at 80 x 25. I have seen two Geforce 2 MXs, same brand, same model, same
drivers, and one will run at 80 x 50 fine, but the other produces characters
with missing pixels, etc. In 80 x 25, and various graphics resolutions they
are both fine.

Go figure.

Dennis.