BleepingComputer.com: Artifacting In Games

Hello, my name is Justin, thought I'd try to find a site that might have people that will know the answer to this amazingly confusing problem I have. About a month ago I began to get artifacting in some games I played. After some research I found that it was most likely due to some overheating of the video card. So I took a house fan and pointed it into my case and the problem seemed to diminish.

Then the problem became much worse.



This is what happened.

To make a long story short, I've replaced Video Card, Motherboard, Power Supply, and the Processor. I've tried different RAM. I've reformatted my hard drive and re-installed windows. Nothing fixed it.

I've even tried my video cards in another computer and they worked just fine.

Does anyone know of another reason I could be getting these artifacts?

System Specs:

MSI K9N Neo-F V.3 AM2 NVIDIA nForce 560 MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ 2.8GHz 65W
Rosewill RP600V2-SL 600W SLI Ready-ATX12V V2.01 Power Supply
EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3
G.Skill 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Thanks for your time.

Wow, seems like a weird prob ... does it do this at all res. i would try a lower and/or higher res and see if it does the same thing. Maybe a different monitor ???? Are the games you are having problems with being played in full screen mode or windowed? Does it seem to make any difference if you change between the two?

KM

yeah i tried a couple different resolutions, and a different monitor. same problem in full and windowed modes too.

Just something to try to see if this makes any difference ... check and make sure you have downloaded and updated your bios for your new board.

did that too lol, this is such a confusing problem

You probably already have done this, but what about the latest drivers for your video card? What about updating directx? Lol, ya not much help, but I can't think of any other reasons except for overheating, and that doesn't seem like the problem.

I had a similar problem with my computer, but my whole monitor would just go black while playing games. This was due to a bad stick of ram. Then again, you said you've tried different ram, lol.

yeah ive tried that, but the other day i lowered the voltage to my vid card using ntune and tried a game and it actually had a lot less problems, but they were still there... im thinking it is an overheating problem of some sort too but it defies reasoning. maybe my computer case is like conducting electricity to it or something lol i dont know.


edit: you know, im kind of thinking that my new psu, which has dual 12v+ rails might be the culprit, i heard that the 8800 needs around 26A to run...and maybe because of the dual rails running each at 19A im getting the problem. Ive seen people say that you add up the two rails and thats actually 38A, but maybe theyre wrong?

No, the two rails do add up. You do have 38A's on the +12V rail, and that should be fine.

I would usually take a guess and say overheating. Have you check the temperature with any program while playing a game? But Wow...what a distorted picture there, I can't really discern much from that. Usually when I overclock a little to much I'll start to see the "snow effect"or wierd shapes flash for a second. But uhhhmmm, to that degree!?

I'm just wondering, it seems like you've pretty much bought a new computer besides the case and DVD drive. About the power supply question, you have the 4-6-8 ( I don't know how many pins the 8800GTS needs for juice ) pin cable connected to the back of the card!? Because 2 12V rails should be fine, the video card will suck power from both rails.

Now I'm most probably wrong or something. Perhaps a piece of the case is touching the card screwing it up? I remember when I was seeing how hot my card was once after hearing the fan go crazy during Oblivion and I meant to touch the headsink to get a general temp and ending up touchign a circuit causing quite a bunch of artifacts.

So why not plug in your motherboard intergrated and playing a game that's not extremly power hungry but still gives you problems on you're 8800GTS.

yeah the power supply is correctly connected to the vid card, however my motherboard doesnt have onboard video. but interesting idea about the card touching the case. ill have to check it out when i get home tonight.

nothing appears to be interacting with the card that i can see.

i tried turning the gpu fan up to 100% using rivatuner, then i put a house fan on high and pointed it into the case, then i lowered the voltages on the gpu really low using ntune and the artifacts were much less. but they didnt go away, i dont understand, considering the cards temp was MUCH lower than even the average temp it should run at and im still getting artifacts. but i now have reason to believe it has to do with the graphics card temperature at least.... no clue what to do next though

I notice my graphics card doesn't start acting up until about 70C . I just turned my computer on about 15 minutes ago, and haven't done anything graphic intensive and it is idling at about 50C. When I've been gaming for a while it usually gets up to the low 60's. Then again, I'm using an ATI X1900GT, so the temperature ranges might be different for your card.

Is the card overclocked?

Even at very low temps overclocked cards can be unstable.

Do you have 2 cards with SLI?

Does this happen in all games, or only in this one?

Billy3

no my card is not overclocked nor is it in sli, just one card. and it happens in every game ive tried

Im at a loss then...
Sorry

Billy3