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2900XT Artifacts

Schnippzle

Schnippzle

Schnippzle

Soldato
Joined
9 Oct 2006
Posts
3,761
Location
here
Howdy,
Since about two months ago my games have started to crash....but only some, and its the same sort of crash every time. The games include SupCom, FA, CoH and CS:S. Thing is, with CoH and CS:S I can alt+tab out of the games and then back in and it will continue running fine. When the games crash, I get loads of square, multi-coloured artifacts across the whoole screen and then the program dies.The card is running at stocks speed and the temps on it are fine. I can run games like NVN2, WoW, CoD4, UT3 etc etc all fine without any problems. I have tried to re-install drivers with Drivercleaner and Driver Sweeper to clean the remains of the left over drivers and I have tried v7.11-8.4. Havent tried 8.5's yet as I heard they are quite shocking. Im running Vista Ultimate 64bit, Q6600 at 3.61ghz and 4 gig OCZ Reaper X ram. Any advice would be much appreciated.
 
Have a look inside your case and see if the HSF of the 2900 is full of dust as it may be overheating. Failing that RMA.
 
Dust probably. My old stock heatsink was clogged to hell and back when I replaced it with a HR-03.
 
Sorry once again, forgot to mention. I have an HR-03 on it which I keep very clean. May have to be an RMA situation :( And as mentioned in OP, temps are fine :)
 
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Ouch.. yea.. sounds like RMA time. Let's hope mine doesn't go the same way..

Hopefully you'll get a 3870 as replacement though. Don't let them fob you off with a 3850 as they are slower.
 
Right, well back on with stock cooler it is then. One problem i do have though is that I have no proof of purchase nor can I remember where I got the card from :S Will have to dig through bank statements now :p
 
Think I solved it....sort of. I had the PCI-e frequency set to 105 in the bios (which as I understand it is fine), but when I set it to auto.......BINGO! Went for a good session of cs:s last night without any crashes or problems. Will be doing some other "testing sessions" later tonight.
 
Holy card revival :D. I hope this was the problem.

I've just sold my 2900Pro and when I seen this I got a little worried.
 
Can you tell if it's memory errors or gpu errors? Memory errors tend to be missing textures, distorted textures, that sort of thing. gpu errors usually show up as 'sparklies', basically random pixels of colour throughout the screen. Maybe a screenshot of the problem?
 
Would love to provide a screenshot of the problem but I dont think its a possibility. When the crash occurs it covers the whole screen and the "blocks" are about 1cm x 1 cm and are multicoloured. The program running will then fail to respond (or in the case of CS:S and CoH I can alt-tab out and then back in again and all is fine) and eventually crash.

On a possibly separate note, I checked my dxdiag and found that my video memory exceeded 2gb...is this normal or could it be related to my problem?
 
Just a final check before I box this card up and request an rma number, could some please explain why my Approx Total Memory is 2297mb rather than 512mb?

dxdiag.jpg
 
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