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Does this look like a dying videocard?

Werewolf

Werewolf

Werewolf

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Joined
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Panting like a fiend
Hi

I've noticed some graphical corruption when playing a few games, and the PC crashed then refused to restart normally (it gave a 1-3 beep code, which looks to be "VGA card" on my Asus motherboard).

It's a Gigabyte 7850 card, and these are some shots of the sort of thing I'm getting (I used my camera to record a video then VLC to get the pictures).
The system is not overclocked at all, and seems to be running fairly cool (the videocard seems to be running at about 29c according to the ATI utility, and CPU at 50ish).




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Sometime it runs for ages without an issue, then sometimes it'll have them fairly fast and repeatedly.

Full specs are
Intel Q6600
Gigabyte 7850
4gb DDR2 Crucial ram
Antext 550 watt PSU
4 HDD's
Asus Pk5 Premium


I'm also getting some oddities with Firefox (minor graphical glitches that disappear when the page is refreshed etc), but don't know if that is related.
 
Looks like memory artifacts. Have you overclocked it at all?

Edit: d'oh you already said that it isn't!

In that case, you could try adding some voltage to the VRAM and core but it looks to me to be faulty. :(
 
Has it happened since a driver update?
Has a game crashed to desktop at all? If so, how did it do it, driver stopped responding or black screen?
Can you do a run of Heaven and see how it goes, report what happens?
 
No overclocking at all, I like my machine quiet.:)

I've only noticed it really in the last week or so (I don't play many games), I'll try updating the drivers again tonight (it's currently running the 13.1's which I think it's been running since I fitted it).

When it crashed a couple of days ago it was a hard crash, black screen, no keyboard response and I had to press reset on the case to get it to start to reboot, then it gave a 1-3 beep code (VGA). It took a complete power down to get it past boot.
 
Right, just ran dead space 3 for half an hour and checked the GPU temp, it was about 45, but dropped to 25c very fast, and the only drivers at the moment that are newer than the ones i'm using are beta.

Cheers for the help :)
 
To test if it is faulty memory, try underclocking the memory with AB or whatever program you know for overclocking.

Drop it 200Mhz and see if you still get artifacts. If you don't, that is a sure sign of bad memory on the GPU. If you still see it, switch drivers.
 
I had something similar to this a few years ago and it was the gpu, the graphical errors showed up on ingame screenshots as well in my case, so I did not need to use a camera.
 
Cheers for the replies :)

I upped the voltage on the card by a massive 3% (yarp three percent), which seems to have solved it, at least for now.
I'll keep an eye on it, and if anything else happens I'll try lowering the ram speed as well/instead of.
 
I had another hard crash earlier whilst playing Simcity, so have dropped the memory to 1100 (it's default was 1200).
When it hard crashes windows doesn't even register a fault, until it restarts and then it's a kernal power (IIRC) "the machine restarted unexpectedly", as opposed to a "driver crashed" message as I've seen in the past when videocards have played up due to overheating (IE my last couple of cards where the cooling started to fail:p)

Also ran furmark again for 20 minutes at my default res (1680x1050), and it only reached 64c (after about 5-10 minutes) before stabilising.

I'll keep an eye on what's going on with the video card etc for now, as I don't fancy an RMA at the moment (I'm planning on a motherboard/cpu/ram/psu upgrade in a couple of months so if it keeps happening after that, I'll know it's got to be the GPU, as everything else will have changed)
 
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