My videocard failing?

[d0rk]

I rebooted my computer and this is what I load too

http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/7127/fuckeduptm3.jpg

Is my video card failing?

/edit
I tried updating the drivers afterwards but nothing seems to help. The boot screens and the monitor properties (veritcal/horizontal positions) looks fine too but as soon as it loads into windows thats what it looks like.

[Sawg]

DVI or VGA?

Have you checked the cable connections. Does it go away if you turn the monitor off and back on.

[d0rk]

DVI I think. Its a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb.

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeon98...pro/specs.html

I just shut the computer down to reseat the cables. I turned the computer on to check if the video card fan was running first and it booted and loaded fine. Everything appeared normal. I opened FF clicked on a link and it is happening again.

No, turning off the monitor doesn't fix it. Although when I scroll down it either gets better or worse.

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/3594/fuckedup2re0.jpg

Although, I do have my fan blowing on the video card now, so maybe thats whats causing it to work....testing with day of defeat

[d0rk]

It appears to work fine with the fan running directly on it.

Looks like I need some canned air.

[EfaustuS9]

Its likely a driver issue I suggest try uninstalling the current drivers in safe mode using driver cleaner pro . After which try installing an older driver set or if you are feeling bold try reinstalling the latest drivers. Furthermore if you are feeling really bold you can try the optimized Omega ATI drivers. The screen shots you provided are rather common artifacts resulting from a bad driver installation in that either the card and the newest drivers don't get along or there is some old registry entires that are confusing widows and your card. A good way to ensure that its not hardware oriented is to boot up a Ubuntu Live CD if every thing is copasetic there then its probably a windows thing.

[d0rk]

Thanks for the advice Efaust, but it has been running great since I set my fan on the ground pointing towards the computer. I don't know if the video card fan is plugged with dust or if its just starting to fail or whats going on.

[P$ycHo™]

i have the same card and i think i had that effect, too. i had a incomplete/wrong driver installation then.(or my F**ked up XP installation didn't load them properly.)
last year my fan didn't work and in games i had many artifacts, too. i think my card had not enough fresh air, because on my damn small mainboard the networks card covered half of the fan. but now it runs pretty fine. i have no proplems with it now.

[Atmo]

What you're seeing is artifacting. It can happen if the card gets too hot or is run at too high a clock rate, but in a lot of cases it's a sign that the card is on it's way out.

[k_rock923]

how come it shows up in a print screen?

[rockouthippie]

If you've ever run an overclock util like RivaTuner you could have screwed up some settings. It almost looks like the card has been set to run at max speed rather than quality... except that's exaggerated.... so like even more so than what the settings would be for max speed.

There should be a tool someplace for this card that shows whether the core temperature is too high. On my nvidia 7100GS (and others) the card will actually slow itself down before it melts. So look at the core temp. Make sure you don't have any overclock settings running. You might even try an overclock utility and underclock.

I'd also take a close look and make sure that your heat sink isn't loose. I saw that happen once. The heat sink got whacked and pulled itself away from the GPU chip.

If the temperature of the GPU is relatively normal, I'd suspect the driver is installed bad. Maybe you are installing from corrupt media?

Originally posted by k_rock923
how come it shows up in a print screen?

That is an interesting question.

[tuckerm]

Originally posted by k_rock923
how come it shows up in a print screen?

I was wondering that too. If it was a video card issue, We wouldn't be able to see it, correct?

[Atmo]

If the corruption is occurring before the output stage (ie: the image is still being processed) it'll show up in a print screen.

[P$ycHo™]

then it is a software mistake. or not?

[tuckerm]

That's not what he said

[P$ycHo™]

i mean it has something to do with the driver if the artifacts appear on the screenshot, because the image is rendered and then send to the monitor. if the proplem appears after rendering, the screenshot would not show it, because it saves the rendered image i think.
(not sure)

[rockouthippie]

It is kind of weird, because I used to work in a repair shop. Of the couple dozen computers I've owned and the hundreds I've worked on, the number of video cards that have had actual hardware failure has been Zero.

I'd still look for software or possibly cooling issues. Is there a fan on the heatsink and is it running?. It also brings to mind the extremely low number of memory failures and cpu failures..... BUT! I've had a bad power supply make it look like the CPU or memory is bad.... also something you might look at?

Now this showing up in your screen capture *might* indicate that the problem is before the graphics card .... maybe.... I'd run a full diagnostic.... and don't eliminate the power supply in your testing.... A bad PS can make other stuff look faulty when it isn't.

[Atmo]

When you hit print screen, it's not just a dump from some external frame buffer.

That's why things such as overlayed video sometimes won't show up and you can't print screen the vista uac dialogs.