Sapphire X1950Pro Ultimate corrupt screen?

[Checkmate]

After having a crisis with the aforesaid card not booting, which was duly solved by a nice beefy 600W PSU, I've now come up against another problem - after 5 or 10 minutes of gaming (C&C3), the screen is corrupted and it only gets worse as time goes on. To me, it looks like memory corruption.

Quitting C&C3 and going back to the desktop clears most of the corruption and a restart clears it completely. It does it with Catalyst 7.1 (from the CD) and 7.4.

Any ideas?

The PSU is a Zalman ZM600-HP... 4x 12V rails at 16A each (504W max for all four) and it's had very good reviews so I don't, not even for gnat of a minute, think it's that. Plus it's got an SLI Ready logo on the box so I'm sure it's more than capable of looking after one X1950Pro.

In case it matters, the rest of the system is
Asus P5N-E SLI (0505 BIOS)
E6600
2x 1GB Corsair XMS2 6400C4

I should also point out there's no overclocking going on (every is at default bar specifying 2.1V and 4-4-4-12 for the RAM) and the ATI driver thing reports temps of about 45-48ºC (case ambient is 39ºC).

I've tried turning the mem clock down with ATITool and RivaTuner but both lock the machine absolutely solid.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

RMA the card, sounds like the memory's had it.

 

[AWPC]

With the same card + a Zalman 460W version of your PSU mine is rock solid stable @ all times so must be a faulty card.

 

[Tute]

Before you RMA it do you have another machine (maybe a friend's PC) that you can try the card in to make 100% sure it's faulty?

 

[Checkmate]

Cheers guys, much appreciated. Ta!


Tute - I don't, no. The only other machine with a PCI-E slot, that I have access to, is a Dell I have a work and that's a non-starter.

The very fact it's 100% happy in Windows but throws a leg out bed when I try altering mem clocks or play a game, suggests to me the card is iffy. Thanks for the suggestion though.



On a similar note, thanks for sensible answers too. Another forum I've looked at keep harping on about power and lack thereof. After £70+ for the Zalman, I would have screamed had someone said the PSU wasn't good enough!

 

[Tute]

Cheers guys, much appreciated. Ta!


Tute - I don't, no. The only other machine with a PCI-E slot, that I have access to, is a Dell I have a work and that's a non-starter.

The very fact it's 100% happy in Windows but throws a leg out bed when I try altering mem clocks or play a game, suggests to me the card is iffy. Thanks for the suggestion though.



On a similar note, thanks for sensible answers too. Another forum I've looked at keep harping on about power and lack thereof. After £70+ for the Zalman, I would have screamed had someone said the PSU wasn't good enough!

I'm just saying as if you send it back and it's not faulty, some retailers can charge you a restocking fee. So it's certainly worth making sure before you pop it in the post. I know OcUK charge £10 if you send something back for an RMA and it turns out to be not faulty.

Just a heads up mate.

 

[MadMatty]

if sucessful with RMA request, include a report with the package of what faults happen when and what tests you have done to try and find solution. Good chance they wont bother with extensive tests if there only going to try and do what you have already done .

 

[Dutch777]

Cheers guys, much appreciated. Ta!

Are you having problems running XP or Vista? as vista isn’t any use for trying to overclock this card either up or down.

Is CNC3 the only game it does this on? With the RMA it would probably be best if you could get it to display corruption e.g. running looping 3DMark on full AF AA does this happen?