Issues: Graphical Corruption / Crash

PiKe · 21 Jan 2013 at 22:35

My girlfriends machine I built is having problems, everything was working fine but now it's suddenly started corrupting the screen with a really nasty sound out the speakers, the system still seems active as the corruption changes as you move the mouse around, on resetting the machine, the bios then becomes corrupted on screen.

This seems to point to a graphics card issue, I tested the machine under IBT and it appeared stable but it's just happened again.

Any ideas? Hopefully the VRAM hasn't gone bad

The card is an Nvidia 8800GT.

Nickolp1974 · 21 Jan 2013 at 22:50

1. Try reseating the gfx card, take out, clean and put back
2. Down clock the memory by 100hz
3. Are ALL drivers upto date
4. Have you got another psu you can test the rig with?

PiKe · 21 Jan 2013 at 23:01

I will give some of those a go next time I'm there, would overheating cause the symptoms I've described?

PaulyD · 22 Jan 2013 at 10:07

Does it only happen when the card is under load? What are the temps roughly when it happens?

Could try loop heaven on extreme settings and see if it occurs again

Ripshod · 22 Jan 2013 at 11:01

PiKe said:
I will give some of those a go next time I'm there, would overheating cause the symptoms I've described?

If the card has been in use for a while the heatsink may well be full of fluff/dust.

Clean the whole system while you're in there, better than going back.

PiKe · 23 Jan 2013 at 17:51

Just turned it on, from a cold boot I have massive screen corruption, it's usable but there's activating everywhere.

Device manager shows the device as stopped (code 43) as it's reporting problems.

Ripshod · 23 Jan 2013 at 18:12

Was the 8800GT one of the ones you needed to bake in the over to repair? Forgot what the problem was called. I think the GPU die was becoming detached from the board. As you'll probably be replacing it it'll be fun trying.

PiKe · 23 Jan 2013 at 19:16

Ok, this is strange...

The BIOS was all corrupted with weird characters in place of others, so I thought maybe it was a RAM issue, I removed one stick and booted the machine and the corruption was gone.

I then remembered I had overclocked the machine to 2.4ghz from 1.8ghz stock but I had also overclocked the bus so the memory was running at 266, for now I've reverted to stock and put the RAM back in, I will see how it goes.