On the right side of my desk is an AMD64-based workstation. It's broken.

It's a bare-bones kit from TigerDirect, to which I added all the bits needed to make it a fairly nice system. It's an AMD64 3000 with 1GB DDR400 RAM, a 250GB hard drive, a DVD+/-RW and DVD-ROM. Zippy.

Until tonight it had what I had hoped would be a decent PNY Verto GeForce 6600GT 8xAGP card. The card has never worked right, and now it seems to have failed completely. Previously the video card would wig out when doing heavy 3D on LINUX, completely stopping any rendering, although one could switch tasks and back and the card would recover. On Windows, it flickers like an old movie, with extra polygons rendered across the screen. Fast, it was, rendering 100FPS at 1600x1200x24-bit, but fast sucks if the whole match stops.

I have 4 PCs on my desk (well, two on, two beside), attached with a KVM. When I switched back to the AMD64 it didn't wake up with the mouse or keyboard presses. Sometimes it happens; in what I think is very evil, the KVM simply "unplugs" the mouse and keyboard (and whatever else is attached to its hub or the keyboard's built-in hub), and sometimes the systems don't recognize the switch. I'm sure that has to do with the speed at which I tap the system switching button. I tried again to no avail.

It also happens on the LINUX systems (two of the boxes run SuSE 9.3 Pro) that the X gets stuck. Usually this is corrected with a quick SSH to restart the X server. Kills whatever programs are running on the desktop, but I don't usually leave anything going when I'm not there. Nope; couldn't attach.

I took the option of last resort; I hit the reset button. I waited, and while the PC seemed to cycle, nothing appeared on the screen, nor did the keyboard or mouse activate. The KVM showed USB connection, and the Ethernet switch showed the port was active, but no flicker on the PC drive light, nor could I open either of the DVD drives.

I dutifully checked the connections in the back to no avail. I pulled the Ethernet and sound; the only two not required to make the box run. Nope, still no good. I pulled open the case and unplugged the only card in there, the GeForce, and then it started.

Of course it took some time to get the system working with the on-board video, which, of course, is not any good by comparison. The system dual-boots Windows XP and SuSE 64-bit, although it's on a short list for Solaris 10. Windows took three reboots to find and install the "new" USB stuff so I could use my mouse and keyboard to steer the "new" video card through the installation of the driver.

SuSE isn't playing so nice. I could not find the built-in video (VIA/S3 Ultra something Pro) in the driver list. I booted with a 9.2 live CD I had on-hand, and found it was using the VESA drivers, so I tried configuring that, but still no joy. I ran a bit through the 9.3 install, hoping to let it put the right drivers on there, but no good either.

Right now the box is running off the Ubuntu 5.10 release candidate live CD. I was hoping it would report better than a VESA driver; well, it does, kind of; it's still using the VESA driver, but it reports the VIA/S3 model name the same as Windows did.

I'm going to send the broken card back to PNY (it's not quite six months through the two-year warranty) and wait for a repair or replacement card. Until then I'll run off the Ubuntu CD, which I'd been meaning to try anyway. I like the new 5.10 as it comes with a handy drive mapping tool that let me mount my partitions, so I can work with my existing files at HDD speed instead of CD speed.