Best video card

[harrymj3]

I bought an empty computer from ubid and installed Windows XP Home Ed in it. I didn't care much for the video quality so I bought a Nivida GeForce4 MX440 64DDR card and installed it with the newest drivers from Nivida site. That's when the problems started. When I try to encode avi files with Tmpgenc to DVD it will work for a while, sometimes an hour or so and then the computer restarts, blue screen, etc. The error message says driver problem or video adapter and the video card is all I changed. I then installed a GeForce2 Pro 32DDR that I had laying around and same thing. It will encode avi to dvd with UL Video Studio 6 without a problem except the quality isn't as good as Tmpgenc. It acts the same bad way with Pinnacile Expression witch also usually gives high quality video. The computer is an HP palillion xt878, 1.3 athlon 512 ram 120 HD, xp home. I formatted the hard drive into 2 partitions w/partitiom magic after I installed the OS. I use drive C, 15g fat32 for the OS and drive(F) NTFS for the storage partition. I know drive F seems strange but that's how it came out and I don't know how to change it. I use Leadtek Win2000xp Delux for capture, burn w/nero when I get that far.
Thanks for any advice. ......... harrymj3

[ZippyP.]

The computer actually restarting sounds like a complete crash and possibly hardware related. Even though it says driver or video problem it seems less likely since you used 2 different cards. Video conversion is pretty CPU intensive and you may have something like a bad ram chip or even the CPU crapping out due to overheating. Make sure your CPU fan is working, if there is one. You can also try swapping out some or all of your ram to narrow it down.

[mrdisky]

Definately a hardware issue, the delayed crash indicates as was already stated, component/everheating failure... Just guessing here but HP usually isn't known for there beefy power supplies, They typically use under watted, over strained supplies, adding anything over the factory configuration can make it the the proverbial Straw.....

If you happen to have another power supply give it a shot, if not might be a good idea to pick one up... the HPs I've had here ranged from 75 to 145 watt supplies.... and thats rated, not actual...

[ZippyP.]

My vote is still for something on the motherboard because 1 program crashes while another runs through OK. Still, it's just a guess.