PC Freezing Problems

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
12,712
Location
Manchester
Not too long ago, I upgraded my pc to a slightly more respectable spec, Sempron 2800+, 1GHz of RAM and, after a thread on here, I bought a lovely shiney 6800 LE and promptly unlocked the extra pipelines and shaders. Worked wonderfully.

However, I've recently started to have problems with it. During gaming, it'll randomly (ie, not at any specific point, or intensive moment) lock up the PC for a few seconds. Usually its ok for a while after that, but sometimes it does this three or four times before the games playable again. Occasionally when the screen returns, it'll be corrupted, which only goes away when you restart the computer.

In some games (only certain ones, strangely) the PC will crash altogether, with the monitor not getting an output and will need powering off and on again.

It also does similar when loading a webpage with lots of images. It'll lock up the PC, and after seconds, the screen goes off then comes back on, and then its fine. Although if the page is particularly image intensive, it may do this a few times before the page is fully loaded.

I've since relocked the pipelines and shaders back to standard, and set the clock back to default (was only oc'ed a bit) buts the problems continue. I've checked temps on both the CPU and the GPU, and both are fine and don't seem to rise before the freezes.

I'm tempted to believe its a graphics card problem, because the screen going off and coming back on would make me think its that thats restarting. I did knock the PC over before this started, but I'm not sure thats related.

I'm a bit lost as to where to go from here to try and diagnose and solve it though, anyone got any suggestions?
 
Are we talking about video corruption here and random flickering of the screen?

Do you get random lines going through your screen and video distortion? Somehow I'm beginning to think, that your card is damaged or has a fault. My graphics card does the same, and was led to believe it's a faulty memory module onboard the card.

Hmm... I do believe that overclocking can also result to this.
 
andi said:
That sounds like what I mean by corrupt yeah.

Thats pretty much what I was thinking, how annoying :(

Might be worth an RMA. :)

I'm running my card fine under Windows but at points it would randomly flicker and during gameplay, there would be a 1cm distortion at the top of the screen, nothing more obvious than a busted card in my opinion. You could try reinstalling drivers and see if that helps - may aid artifacting (if that's the case) but we're talking about corruption here, seems to be an obvious a sign of hardware damage. Am requesting an RMA myself.
 
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