Video Card woes (Fixed. And Now Santa's Gonna Upgrade Me.)
Friday, December 1st, 2006 - 7:53am
howdy.
I've suddenly started having an intermittent problem, that I'm guessing has to do with my video card.
My system is 2.5-3 years old. 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro, and a fairly new 19" Sony LCD monitor that hasn't given me problems.
I downloaded the latest drivers. Just in case. No go.
What I'm seeing: it starts with vertical bands of lines/streaks about 3/4 inch wide, every 2 inches or so. The colors in the lines look inversed. Then it hits the whole screen, and I've got streaky, inversed lines running vertically.
So far it's started while playing Civ IV Warlords, but since that's all I do beside email and GWJ...don't think it's software.
I check all connections; there isn't any new weird interference that I would know about. The inside of the case is pretty dirty, so I'm gonna try blowing out the dust, cleaning all the leads on the video card, and plugging it back in. (leaving for my job in a bit...so I'll be doing it 7 hours or so from now).
The intermittent part makes me wonder about just plain old dirt messing with the video card. Maybe my card is on the way out.
Have any insights? Lemme know. Especially if you think the video card is just hosed and I need a new one.
My wife and I are both finding Civ to be very soothing while doing the whole little baby thing (she's four weeks old now. yeh.).
edit: okay, it happens while surfing. it also seems to be happening about 30-45 minutes after PC turns on. Heat??
Sounds like heat, but from this question in particular it sounds like you want the answer to be that you need a new vid card.
Posting on the boards is easy. The trick is to kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Chiggie Von Richthofen on how to transition from lurker to poster.
Meh. Nuke the pc from orbit, then get you a whole new rig, 8800 GTX and all.
Quintin_Stone wrote:
lunabean wrote:check your fan on the card to make sure its still spinning when powered up....it does sound like heat, and that would be the best way to ratchet it up without an obvious reason a la dust.
Also when it starts happening you might try switching the monitors just to rule that out. Your description sounds a little different than what I would expect to see from an over-heating video card.....not enough that it wouldn't still be my first guess though.
You might also have some luck with finding out what the card temp is under the video cards settings (display properties->settings->advanced->Radeon tab). I know its there for nVidia, but its been a while since I had an ATI card.
Warrior Asherr
Hunter Ghorin
Checked the fan, it's working fine. All of them. PC has two big fans in back, one on power supply, one in middle, plus one attached to video card and the one attached to the CPU. All buzzing away. Interior of my PC was...pretty nasty. Cleaned it out, took out video card and cleaned the leads. Discovered how to get to front vents on computer, which were clogged with dirt and cat hair.
Blech.
If when I boot up (like right now) the video is fine, but after 20-40 minutes, the video starts going crazy (first the bands of inverted colors, and then some truly whacked stuff happens all over the screen) it has to be the video card, yes?
I'm actually not that hugely excited about getting a new video card, as this one has been fine for the games I play.
If I do need to get a new one, I have no idea what I'm going to find in the stores here in Greece. Can you guys list some mid-range video cards (i'm not getting whatever's latest and greatest) that would be a decent upgrade from my Radeon 9800? I haven't kept up on video cards at all. I'm not hugely attached to ATI vs nVidia (other than the nVidia ads are annoying). The only issue I remember hearing about was fan noise...which I'd be cool with avoiding.
Anyway, we'll see in 20-30 minutes or so whether the card is happy now that my computer has better airflow, and the grime is gone.
Update: Weirder and Weirder. Browsing the internet using IE 7.0, not getting any graphics glitches, the bands, or the spiral/3D flashing weirdness that follows. If I start Civ, happens immediately. It's like some specific graphics function is freaking out the card or something. Thing is...we've been playing Civ for weeks on my old driver. New driver didn't fix it.
Gonna run Dxdiag and see what that does...
When I change applications, the problem corrects itself. But it's happening in any game I load, including oldies but goodies like Half Life. Weirdest thing in HL is that sometimes the vertical bands were taking up the whole screen, at other times they became texture on the walls and stuff in HL. Weird O Rama.
initial problem (screen from HL)
mapping artifact texture on the wall, etc (in HL)
what Civ IV looks like after a minute or so...
Thoughts?
The Civ 4 looks identical to what my 360 did when Chromehounds overheated my system.
I think someone needs a new pc.
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You don't think it's just the video card? that would be bad...
edit: one last note, when I change resolution, the size of the vertical bands changes correspondingly (i.e. at 800 x 600, each band takes up a much larger portion of the screen).
The screen shots above are at 1280 X 1024. Where the width of the bands on my 19" monitor is like 3/4 of an inch. At 1024 x 768, they take up like 2.5 inches, and I only see 2 of them.
So....you know....please please please tell me it's just the video card. L( New baby = no budget for new computer....
well if you can screen shot it its definitely not the monitor....is there a chance you could get another video card to test with?
also if you want to rule out the heat issue, just open the side of the case and point the biggest fan you can find at it.
Warrior Asherr
Hunter Ghorin
It looks like video memory is getting filled with garbage. What's doing that? My top suspects would be: thermal problems on the video chip, or video memory starting to fail.
To test the first, I'd follow pol's suggestion, and see if that helps. Otherwise you might need a new video card.
DuckiDeva was having that problem with her nVidia GeForce 6600 GT OC and it _was_ drivers. Try different drivers. The latest drivers are not always the best. Also, I had pretty good luck with the Omega drivers for my 9800 Pro, so you might try that.
To rule out heat, you might also grab a desk fan, pop the case off, and next time that crops up, turn the fan on pointed directly at your vid card.
Also, maybe your power supply is going.
But I'd try _different_ drivers.
"And my son, too, thinks everything is a launchpad, every bug a meal, and every sunny day a reason to take all your clothes off and roll around in the grass." - rabbit
edit: it's not the driver. I just uninstalled all of the catalyst stuff, and my computer still had drivers from 2004 on it somewhere, which got automatically installed when it detected the card. A couple reboots later...still putzed. Not heat. Definitely video memory.
i found this after googling :
Acording to what you said cleaning it help but it might have not been enough. You may want a front case fan to pull air in from the buttom of the case. Another thing you may want to use cable ties on the cables to get the orgenized in the case to help the air circulation.
When all else fails you may want to get thermal grease reapplied to the card's fan and if you mess it up you can kill the card for good( i have experiance in doing that). You may want a profesional to do this or maybe replace the fan. VGA fans can cost about 20-50$ depending on the fan so you may not want to invest money on this aging card and just try to reapply the grease or get a profesional to do it for you.
AGP video card give a lousy price performance ratio and you may consider getting a new rig. Depending on your budget you may want to wait a month or two for Nvidia's mainstream DX10 cards for ATI's answer which would probobly cause a price drop. If you want to buy a new rig you should plan it to work with Vista/DX10 or else just get a mainstream card and upgrade to DX10 at later time. Next month intel is also releasing the e4300 with fsb 800 which would probobly be their newest dual core value processor which all the OCers are waiting for (core clock of 200MHz FSB X9 compared to e6300 266 X 7 ).
So i got to the store today, and it turns out there's this fancy new slot called PCI Express that doesn't exist on my 3 year old motherboard. Who keeps track of these things? Apparently not me.
As I drooled over all of the video cards I could not buy, I sighed and picked up the only AGP card they had, Radeon 9250 (256MB).
I have no good idea how much of a step-down this is from my 9800 Pro. It seems to handle the same resolution for the screen. It claims to have anti-aliasing and other cool things that I normally set to "let the card figure it out, I can't be bothered"
It was not heat. It was the video memory, which was FUBARed and decaying every time I turned it on again to check this thread. The Windows welcome screen was seriously messed up, even with a big fan blowing....
Yes, yes, an excuse to get a new rig at some point. But not this year. So long as Civ IV and the occasional CS:S and DoD:S run well...only so many kinds of gaming one can do in between diaper changes.
Thanks everybody for helping me troubleshoot. You guys really give me peace of mind...both in your help, and knowing you're there to help me. Thanks.
I had the same experience with my 9800XT about a month ago, same problem, same solution. The memory just died one day out of the blue, I would randomly get artifacts just sitting at my desktop. Then I just broke down and bought a crap-tastic GF6200. Good luck trying to get CS:S running with that 9250 Roo
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I had the same with an 9700. With me I think it was a heat only problem. I fixed it by buying a zalman GPU cooler (with memory cooling thingies). That did the job.
I don't watch, I interact!
Last year they built a huge mall in Athens and called it....dum dum DUM: The Mall of Athens.
This year they're building a huge restaurant called, "The Restaurant. With Food and Stuff."
Anyway, turns out Santa was able to find me an AGP card in Greece afterall. He hinted that at Christmastime I'll be trying out an ATI X1650 Pro. And I'm just assuming this is much, much better than my dead 9800 Pro.
If someone could help me find a link to just how much cooler it would be, that'd be swell. (like a good site with benchmarks, fps with different games, available resolutions, tips for any tweaking, yah dah yah dah). So in the end, Badferret is right. I'm now excited about my old, dead video card. Merry Xmas indeed.
Well you probably wont find a direct comparison between the 2 cards, as the x1x series from ATI is a full 2 generations ahead of the 9xxx series. That said I think you'll be quite the happy gamer come Christmas morning...
btw youre pretty much required to buy new games with that much upgrade
Warrior Asherr
Hunter Ghorin
My computer time is so limited now (baby girl is 45 days old today), I was just hoping to be lazy and have someone who already knows exactly where to look, show me some stats just on the new card. Like fps in a few high-end games, that kinda benchmarky stuff. Maybe available screen resolutions and how it performs under those. I used 1280 x 1024 with my 9800 Pro.
This VGA chart is the newest and it include the x1600pro but not the older cards. It includes x700 which is similar to the 9800.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx=33&model1=572&model2=...
Acording to the chart they show similar performance aspecially at higher resolutions where they start crawling relative to newer cards.
It may be too new to compare to the old one:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_vii/page7.html
You can also google for more benchmarks ...
The hardware site i brouse in Israel sugests not to spend more than 240$~ on an AGP card. I'll list the cards they are currently recomending but take note those were done by comparing Israeli retailers (calculated with 1$ =4.2 NIS )
Low end
ATi Radeon 9600Pro Lite 83$
Entry level
best=NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (NU) 130$~ good price performance
others=ATi Radeon X1300Pro 119$~ ,NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS 167$~ ,,ATi Radeon X1600Pro 155$~
Mainstream
best : NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT 238$ (which may be limited by the cpu/architecture)
other : ATi Radeon X800GTO 190$
High end
N/A
Extreme
N/A