Massive graphical corruption and hard crash

Discussion in 'General Hardware' started by Quicksilver, Feb 29, 2008.

  1. Quicksilver

    Quicksilver Geek Trainee

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    Hello,

    I am having a weird problem, especially when playing games. I've had my computer running with new hardware since Christmas, and no big problems with it so far, until now. When Playing Freespace 2, I was making good progress into a particularly hard mission when, all of a sudden with out any kind of warning at all, the graphics corrupted all of a sudden: by that I mean several thin colored bars of off-colored static appeared, and the entire screen seemed... off, like all the pixels were swimming around or something.

    Anyways, once I had finished cursing and felt like doing something about the problem, I rebooted. However, as the computer was starting up the dos BIOS looked corrupted as well. Not in the same fashion as when I had been playing, though - the screen was fine, but various dos characters were mission, or had changed color, and I don't know quite what's wrong. It wouldn't start windows, either, not all the way. It would get into a corrupted looking start-up screen with the moving bar as usual, but instead of going to the welcome screen, patterns of graphical corruption would appear and my monitor would start blinking as if it were getting no signal. I turned it off for a bit to see if it was over heating, than turned it on again and set my silverstone fan to maximum speed. It started up normally this time, and I decided to test it out with a different game. This time I played I-war 2, and it started fine... until five seconds into the game, where, yes, the computer crashed, the screen filled with graphical corruption, and the sound began to stutter and repeat like it was caught in a time warp. I hit reset and the startup screen had that same corrupted look, but no error messages or anything. Eventually, after several resets and attempts to get to the Welcome screen and ending up with only the blinking no signal from my monitor, I got it in Safe mode, which didn't help things as i thought it would. I turned it off again, waited, and turned it on again. There isn't any corruption anymore... as long as I don't play something. Is this over heating? a driver issue? What's going on?!


    Is this a problem with my motherboard, my CPU, or my Graphics card? Or some kind of virus? I'm currently running an anti-virus check and will do the whole gamut of tests including checkdisk and new drivers, but I was wondering if anyone could recognize the symptoms.

    I have also included Dxdiag so you can tell me if you notice anything horrifically wrong about my hardware setup. For those who don't want to sift through it, I'll summarize. I have a Nvidia 7600 GS with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ with 2 gigs of RAM. I have two hard drives, one 300gb and one 400gb, both SATA RAID. The only new piece of hardware I have added is a reclusa keyboard, which crashed REALLY hard when I tried the media player buttons the first time but has not given me trouble since.

    Thank you in advance!
     

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  2. Wildcard

    Wildcard Big Geek

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    Do you hear any post beeps when you turn the computer on? Also, do you have another video card you could try in the computer to see if that would work... or can you put your video card in a different computer to see if it works there?
     
  3. Quicksilver

    Quicksilver Geek Trainee

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    No, I don't hear any POST beeps when I turn the computer on. I seriously doubt that if I change the graphics card, things will get better. I have not yet pulled out the card to check the onboard card but I will do that later today, thanks for the suggestion. The corruption is more than visual, the DOS characters and text are corrupted and changed in color. At first I wondered if it was a power supply problem, but after upping to a 650 from a 450W, nothing has changed. I'm ALMOST certain it's the motherboard. Like I said, the last test is to see if the graphics card being pulled out would help.

    I have looked inside the computer and nothing looks immediately wrong and there's no scent of burned electronics or overheating, so damage, or at least readily apparent damage or loose components are not the problem.
     
  4. Ashton

    Ashton Geek Trainee

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    your gpu seems to be overheating. downlclock, get a better case, or install third party cooling on the card
     
  5. Tech

    Tech Padawan

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    Yep. I agree with Ashton here. Just for a laugh you might want to try a quick stress test using this.
     
  6. MercyFlush

    MercyFlush Geek Trainee

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    before you spaz out, just check to make sure that all your cards, especially your video card, are seated properly in the expansion slots. it does sound like it is most likely overheating, but it can't hurt to check
     

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