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Has my GPU had it?

meths

meths

meths

Soldato
Joined
12 Mar 2005
Posts
4,403
I got a HIS 3870XT Turbo off here about 4 weeks ago and kept getting error messages when playing Medieval 2 that said the display driver had stopped working but had recovered, then I had random blocks appear onscreen and eventually Vista (X64) crashed.

After that when I tried to boot the computer the screen looked like something off of the Matrix and it didn't make it into the OS.

Now two days later I switched on the PC and everything has loaded up just fine.

I think the card is the cause of the problems and am gonna stress test it later using ATI tool to try an get it to fail but could anything else be causing these symptoms?
 
It could be a funny heatsink that's letting the card overheat. Hence the artifacts. Try ATI Tool as you have said, see if it ots the card up and makes it go funny.
 
Got errors while scanning for artifacts almost instantly.

Ah well looks like another RMA for me and OCUK don't stock the card anymore.

Edit: I didn't even let the GPU temp go above 60C so I doubt that it'd be the heatsink.
 
Last edited:
It was the Turbo edition clocked to 850mhz and cost £164 when it was on this week only.

The next Radeon up appears to be the 3870 X2, anything else would be a step down in performance and I don't fancy an 8800GT.:p
 
Just thought I'd ask for a final opinion before RMAing the card.

This is what happend when scanning for artifacts using ATI Tray Tools in XP...
ScreenDump.bmp

...and using ATItool in Vista...
New%20Picture.bmp


Sorry about the rubbish quality of the pics but you can see in both cases the 3D image is affected and in XP the glitches even spill onto the desktop.

The GPU temp never went above 69C which I think is well within the operating temps for a 3870.

The person at OCUK dealing with my RMA enquiry suggested that my PSU may not be up to the job but I thought that it should be fine.

I have a 620W Enermax Liberty powering:
E6600 @ 3.2Ghz
2gb G.skill Ram
DFI Infinity 975x/g Mobo
X-Fi Fatal1ty
Linksys Network Card
1 HDD
1 DVD Drive
A water pump
3 fans

and of course the graphics card.

The same psu ran the above setup with an X1900XT with no problems but if it's likely that it could be a lack of power I suppose I could unplug a stick of ram, the soundcard, network card, DVD drive and 2 of the fans and give it a go.

What do you guys think?
 
RMA time imo as that PSU is more than upto the job, wont hurt to unplug a few things to reduce load just in case psu's a duffer.
 
Ended up going for the 8800gt Crysis Edition as I was gonna buy the game anyway and it was a straight swap for the duff card.

So what are the best nvidia drivers for Vista x64? Are the official ones okay or should I go straight for the betas?
 
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