Video Card dying?

W

Waffle

Alpha Geek
I've had my 9800PRO for about..2 years now. It's served me well..but I'm afraid to say I think it's dying, and need a second opinion.

During any graphic intensive application..usually gaming, the monitor, will, at random intervals, either:

turn off, then back on with the message "no signal output"

go BSOD colour blue, totally freeze up, and need a reset to fix it

completely scramble whatever image was on the screen..distort, pixels all over the place

Are there any diagnostics I could run before assuming my faithful card has kicked the bucket? Everything appears to be fine when not gaming, which is why I'm not 100% it is infact dying.

I have installed the latest drivers, and tried reinstalling XP a few times, but to no success.

Might be wise to note that FastWrite is turned OFF, and, for whatever reason, if I'm lucky enough to be able to close the game before the PC locks, I sometimes get the ATi drivers' VPU Recovery screen appear, which then asks to restart to apply default video settings..

Temperature is fine, nothing is overclocked...any suggestions?
 
I've had similair problems with my Radeon9200se! It mostly occured when I was still running Windows 98se. Often when I ran a game, and the resolution changes, the screen would be in a mess. Everythings in a low resolution and the color is messed up. So I don't think that your card is broken, or even dying! My radeon is working fine in a new P4 system.
 
Hm..I'll give memtest a shot, but I'm thinking this is more than just RAM.. I did run Ultra X (if you've heard of it?) earlier, and that found no errors at all..left it for about 3 hours.
 
Hows your PSU? If its only just started to do this then I'd suspect it as they're more likely to fail over time than video cards. You might want to try another PSU in there to see.
 
Addis said:
Hows your PSU? If its only just started to do this then I'd suspect it as they're more likely to fail over time than video cards. You might want to try another PSU in there to see.
Click to expand...

It doesn't sound like a PSU problem to me. Did you just reinstalled windows, or actually format and then installed windows? I'm thinking its either a driver problem, or its indeed pooched.
 
Hm, it didn't sound like a PSU problem to me either..I would have expected the system to crash more frequently if that was the case.

I have installed windows several times, totally formatting the drive on one of these occasions. The latest ATis and Omega's both have the same result...unless an older version of the radeon is available..I'm thinking around 5.x something, I'm gonna have to try a different card.
 
Try the drivers off the CD that came with it. Other then that it ain't lookin too good Waffle lol.
 
Why dont you give Linux a go, see if you get any problems with that.
i dont know if you will be able to get games and graphics drivers running, but i am sure the forum will be able to help, i think you should give linux a try anyway, i was able to get linux running, with lots of help.


anyhting in your bios been changed?
maybe bios reset itself, i noticed once my bios reset itself and did not put some settings back right, caused a lot of problems untill i corrected the settings.
mabe graphics card is not seated in slot properly?
maybe its infact the motherboard thats on its knees?

with my old pc, i has a simaler problem, and i thought it might of been the graphics card, but it turned out to be the motherboard was faulty, and computer kind of shut down when using any graphics intensive apps :s
 
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