Blue Sparkling caused by new 7870 GPU or Monitor?

[LeBouef]

Hi,
I've just upgraded to a Gigabyte 7870 OC and am getting blue 'sparkles' in dark areas on screen on the main monitor in a dual-screen setup.

Straight after installing it on Friday, the sparkles consisted of horizontal flickery blue lines across dark areas of the desktop which could be got rid of by turning the monitor off and on again. The monitor is a Samsung 245B, and the second is a 2443BW which doesn't show the problem - I swapped the cables to confirm this and only the 245B seems to be affected. Both monitors are connected by DVI, with one going through a HDMI-DVI adapter

On saturday morning I booted up from cold, and the problem had gone - no blue sparkles on the desktop or in games and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Then today, the desktop is again fine, but loading up Black Mesa Source, and the sparklies are back in dark areas in the game. Again, turning the main monitor off and on again cleared it.

This wasn't happening with the old 4890 card, so it's tempting to lay the blame on the new GPU(other forums seem to blame blue sparklies on corrupted GPU memory), except how would that be affected by power-cycling the monitor?

Am I going to have to RMA the new card, or buy another monitor?

 

[Cleeecooo]

Welcome to the forums

Can you try putting the WF OC card down to stock 7870 clocks and seeing if the problem goes away?

Sounds like dodgy VRAM or a faulty overclock to me

 

[LeBouef]

Welcome to the forums

Can you try putting the WF OC card down to stock 7870 clocks and seeing if the problem goes away?

Sounds like dodgy VRAM or a faulty overclock to me

Thanks

I tried dropping the clocks to regular speed from the Overdrive section in Catalyst on Friday but that didn't fix it, and neither did lowering them below stock-speeds which also led to me having to completely wipe the drivers after taking the memory clock *too* low and crashing the system every time catalyst loaded

Is it possible for the card to be affected by toggling the monitor? Or perhaps the monitor loses sync with the out-of-spec VRAM, and power cycling it just sort of re-acquires a good-enough lock to the bad signal...