Artifacts show up on screen

[flaviooooo]

Hi,

I am having a problem with my Radeon 9800 XL video card. Well at least I think this is the cause.

About every 10 minutes, my screen freaks out on me and I get these 'artifacts'. On this link you can see an example :

http://users.pandora.be/spartakuringen/vreemd.JPG

Today, I can't even get it away anymore... Normally when I rebooted, the screen was fine again for a while.

What I have tried to solve this:
-Installed the latest drivers for my videocard
-I took out the videocard, and cleaned the fan which was covered in dust
-Changed some settings in control panel: put the bar of Hardware Acceleration to 'None' and disabled 'Combined Writing'
-I even tried hooking the pc up to a different monitor...

Some research told me that this is caused by an overclocked videocard, but I can't say I did this. Well not on purpose at least, as I don't even know how I should do this...
Btw: If this were the case, isn't there a way to 'underclock' it back?

Thanks in advance!

 

[felixc]

There is probably a cold solder on one of the chips on your board. It probably goes on and off along with the thermal cycles of your board. There is nothing that you can do. Bring the board back for repair, along with a print of your picture.

Hope it's still under warranty period.

 

[flaviooooo]

Will my pc be harmed in any way if I leave it on like this for a while?

The reason I'm asking is that I have a lot of data on that pc that needs to be either moved to another pc, or written to dvd/cd-rom. This will take a while, and I would like to use the pc for a while as well.

 

[addy]

It shouldn't harm the rest of your PC but will probably make the Video Card even worse than it is now. Like felixc said, it could be a solder on one of the chips or it could be a badly seated heat sink on the core.

Your best bet would probably be to borrow a card from someone or buy the cheapest PCI graphics card you can find and use that to transfer all your data.

 

[felixc]

Luckily this bug does not affect the transfers between the CPU and the graphics so you can still use it. But you will have to get another card sooner or later. Try to find a friend or a colleague with an old PC on a shelf where you can borrow the graphics card while you get the other one repaired.

 

[fizzak]

Are you feeding it with enough power? What wattage is your power supply and how much stuff are you running off of it?

 

[flaviooooo]

I'm not quite sure about the power question, but it has worked for months before and now all of a sudden I get this...


I have now put in an older video card, and haven't had any problems yet.
The other one is still under warranty period, so it return to sender

 

[kiddpete]

This happened to me with a 9700 Pro right after I rebooted following a Zone Alarm upgrade. Fortunately, after I shut it down, it went away and hasn't recurred.

 

[Houdini1975]

I have the same thing going on with the same video card. Is it not possible that it is a driver conflict or something?

 

[Houdini1975]

update on this one: I called ATI and there customer service dept said they will RMA the product in order to fix it.

to do this you need to register the product at ATI.com and then fill out this form.

https://apps.ati.com/rma/rma.html

Good luck

Frank