6870 HD 1GB giving yellow and white stripes at bootup

[bobgold]

Hello!

A week ago I bought a XFX 6870 HD 1GB to replace my Nvidia 8800GTS. At first I had no problems but lately I have randomly been getting wierd errors when booting up.

The monitor displays yellow and white stripes both vertically and horizontally. There are also some blinking ascii characters sometimes.

The problem persists until windows 7 is just about to show the login/pwd box only to go black and will only accept a hard reset from there.

If I reset the computer a few times the problem changes characteristics slightly with each
reset until it shows no artifacts and at which point I let the system boot up and theres no problem.

I have not yet experienced any problems with the graphics when it has finally booted up.

My system:
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, P965, Socket-775,
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz Socket
Corsair Value S. PC5300 DDR2 2048MB
NorthQ 4775-500BULK, ATX 500W, 120mm
Samsung 20" LCD Syncmaster 204B TCO03
Windows 7 64-bit Home

The old graphics card works fine with the computer so Im assuming it is the card that is producing the errors. What do you think?

 

[bobgold]

I could not edit the OP to contain this so Im posting a reply with a picture of the problem...

 

[wa1]

Your board is the same as mine, which have pcie slot 1.1, and your card (HD6870) is 2.1 card, that might be an issue since many people report that 2.1 card sometimes works on 1.x slot and sometimes not...

What is your PSU? Brand? model?
Also, remember to uninstall the old driver (8800GTS) before installing HD6870.
OverClocking your CPU a little bit should help increasing your PC performance.

 

[Mousemonkey]

That does look like the symptoms of a dead or dying GPU though, reminds me of the infamous GSOD/Vertical line issue that the 5xxx series suffered from.

 

[bobgold]

Your board is the same as mine, which have pcie slot 1.1, and your card (HD6870) is 2.1 card, that might be an issue since many people report that 2.1 card sometimes works on 1.x slot and sometimes not...

What is your PSU? Brand? model?
Also, remember to uninstall the old driver (8800GTS) before installing HD6870.
OverClocking your CPU a little bit should help increasing your PC performance.

Ive removed all the nvidia drivers, allthough I did it after installing the radeon drivers.

My PSU is the one listed above:
NorthQ 4775-500BULK, ATX 500W, 120mm

The wierd thing is that the problem almost always disappears after about three or four restarts.. if it was that the GPU was dying wouldnt it give some artifacts when playing games?

Another thing is that without a custom afterburner profile the GPU fan goes to 100% and the temperature when idle is around 38-45C. With the profile activated the fanspeed is set to ~25% and the temperature stays within 45-50C.

 

[bobgold]

I tried switching the monitor cable to the other connector on the card without luck. The screen stays black until I have restarted the computer about 4-5 times then the picture comes back and everything seems normal again.

Changing back to the other connector I get the same error with the yellow and white stripes.

 

[bobgold]

anyone?

 

[Supernova1138]

Yes, that definitely looks like the card is dying. Best to get into contact with XFX about warranty, as you will need a replacement. If you do have a spare video card lying around, you could test with that to make sure the motherboard is not at fault, but it is most likely a GPU problem.

 

[bobgold]

Best answer selected by bobgold.

 

[bobgold]

Taking the card back to the reseller tomorrow..

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey