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do these white dots never go away?!! :'(

veryrandom101

veryrandom101

veryrandom101

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Joined
22 Dec 2009
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175
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bugle, cornwall (yay)
Alright, i've just built myself an awesome pc, and everything has been working amazingly for a few weeks until i tried out the 10.3 preview drivers. Ever since then i've been getting those annoying white dots that plague us poor ati owners so bad. I still cant seem to find an answer for the problem. i have tried returning back to the 10.2 and 10.1 and even 9.12 in desperation. removing all drivers correctly with driver sweeper etc. to no avail. Currently im back on the 10.2 which ran so beautifully for me in the past. I did notice at one point after alt+tabbing in a game that my gpu was at 72c is that normal, or is my gpu suddenly going funny? Any help would be much appreciated, as these white dots are in everything.
P.S. i have NEVER oc'd or even fiddled with my gpu apart from 3d settings.
And i really hope formatting isnt an option. Re-installing windows so many times is going to kill me one of these days.

My system is:
Intel Core i7 920 @ 4.0GHz - Gigabyte EX58-UD5 - 6Gb Corsair XMS3 C7 @ 1600Mhz 8-8-8-20 - XFX ATI Radeon HD 5870 1Gb (stock settings) - Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme cpu cooler - OCZ GameXstream 1010w PSU - Samsung Spinpoint F3 500Gb + Seagate Barracuda 1Tb - Windows 7 Ultimate 7600
Acer H243H 24" WS 1080p
 
What white dots? Pictures?

I've had numerous ATI cards (5870 currently.) and never had "white dots" or even heard of then. Try another monitor, try the card in another PC if you can or try another card in your PC. That should be able to point to making a decision about RMA time or not.
 
White dots or 'sparklies' are core artifacts, 'patches' of weird colours and/or geometry artfiacts are usually memory.

Try lowering the core clock in ATI overdrive and see if it goes away, if it does then you need to get a new card.
 
hi, thx for the replies. its very hard to find the topics with these white dots, but they are there. also when i read release notes on cant remember which catalyst drivers. 9.10 or above, there have been known problems with white dots, but then they were fixed. until beta drivers, so how the hell can a preview/beta driver blow a perfectly good card? and strangely enough in crysis its only the shadowy parts that get them.
I really dont want to wait months for a new card, so i'll try lower clock, if not, format. coming from nvidia, i really dont trust ati's drivers at all, so excuse me for pointing the blame there.. but i have a sneaky suspicion it is
 
haha no, my eyes are only orange spots, i'd know the difference :P#
i lowered the core and memory of the gpu drastically, and its still there. but like i say it seems to pretty much be in the shadows.
no screenshots im afriad, i seem to be extremely useless at it
 
Doesn't show up in screenshots? Monitor? Maybe try a different one if you have a spare lying around... just to be sure it isn't that. As said above it sounds like core artifacts.
 
As p0rks0da says white snow normally points to a hardware problem. I remember my geforce 6800 ultra was one of the MSI ones sold with the wrong chip on it that had less... er... thingies (12 instead of the 16 it ought to have). I found a hack to unlock the extra thingies which got me the right performance, but lots of white snow bacause basically the chip was bad. I've also seen it when going to far with an overclock.

If down-clocking your card's core helps that will pretty much confirm it, and you get your card replaced. Don't bother wasting your time with a reformat - aint no way it has owt to do with windows. As for the shadows, I bet you it's happening everywhere, but white pixels in shadows are just much easier to notice. Or maybe the fault is in part of the chip that only gets used processing shadows, but doubt that.

Liam
 
Me and my mate both get the same white dot on bfbc 2 single player, its just to the bottom right of the screen. so i would say it was a driver issue as his spec apart from the graphics card is completly different (he's amd im intel)
 
hartty said:
Me and my mate both get the same white dot on bfbc 2 single player, its just to the bottom right of the screen. so i would say it was a driver issue as his spec apart from the graphics card is completly different (he's amd im intel)
Click to expand...

I get that too. not sure its a driver issue as i don't get it anywhere else in any other game. I'm on 9.1.2 hotfix for reference
 
mmj_uk said:
Is it this? from October...
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18062399
Click to expand...
Yes thats pretty much exactly it, apart from mine isnt patterened with lines and stuff. Ok this may change everything, but i got a small shot from part of my desktop showing the white dots. they are at exactly the same place on the image, and the strange thing is when i zoom in on the image, the dots change position, and i even got a small green line. So im guessing that its probably the monitor i bought only last week maybe?
 
cheers though, thats the exact thread i needed thats been avoiding me. I'll try a few other things and see what happens. just half glad to know my card isnt blown
 
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