Is there any Linux diagnostics software for nVidia GeForce graphics cards?
 

I have a nVidia 6800GT AGP graphics card driving two monitors using TwinView on a 32-bit Slackware 13.1 system which is powered on all the time. I was working on it yesterday morning, I locked the screen with xlockmore & left it for about an hour. When I came back, both screens were displayins lots of black & white rectangular bricks, the screen was frozen, I couldn't kill X, I couldn't switch to a VT console and I couldn't even log into it from another system. Hitting the reset button got the system going again in the usual console mode but every time I typed 'startx', both screens would light up blue, the nVidia logo would flash by and then the system would crash & lock up.

I reconfigured X to use the VESA driver and all was OK (except for only one screen in a rather lower resolution) and then I discovered eth1 had weirdly renamed itself to eth0 courtesy of udev & network connection was down so I had to reconfig the network for eth0 before I could do anything else. Finally, I downloaded & installed the very latest nVidia kernel driver and also a fairly old one - neither fixed the problem & the system keeps crashing as soon as X starts and the xorg.log is empty. Systems works OK with VESA drivers though.

I suspect the graphics card is faulty and that the nVidia driver uses parts of it that the VESA drivers don't. Does anyone know of any hardware diagnostics software to test nVidia graphics cards under Linux? Before I look for another one on eBay...

I'm also mystified about the network interface getting renamed. eth0 used to be an on-board 100 Mbit/s interface but 6 weeks ago I added a gigabit PCI card which appeared as eth1 so I reconfigured the system to use that. The original 100 Mbit/s interface has now disappeared - but why did it take 6 weeks to vanish?

The only reason the original interface would vanish is because you turned it off in BIOS.

If you haven't done this then it may be possible your motherboard has suffered some sort of failure. This may also be the cause of your problems with the graphics card. There may be nothing wrong with your graphics card.

Have you made any changes to your system's config/updated packages recently?

Can you boot a live cd and verify that the graphics card fails with the nvidia drivers and the onboard nic isn't detected?

It did turn out to be a faulty graphics card in the end. Left in text (ie, ASCII character) mode long enough, the display would suddenly turn into a veritable kaleidoscope of colour. I bought another one on eBay (exactly the same nVidia 6800GT chipset, etc but actually a better version with a heavy copper heatsink and two cooling fans). Now that PCI-e is all the rage, these are so inexpensive secondhand.

cheers, Andy