Artifacts and weird dots, will it die out ?

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unknownuser

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Hello, i've got an old pc: Q9550, 4gb corsair ram, asus p5kr mobo, gts 250 video card and a sandisk ssd running Windows 10. A few days ago all of the sudden without any change Diablo 3 started crashing or just freezing. This happened before with other video card so i thought it was nothing special, but yesterday my pc started acting weird. Started wow and bam artifacts, weird textures, even the windows start bar was flashing. I restarted the pc and all seemed ok till after ~1h in diablo weird dots appeared and started moving around the screen. Again i restarted the pc and installed newer drivers (though the ones i had were 1 month old only) and since then it works without any problems. I did an artifact scan, full 3dmark test to stress out the video card but nothing.
Will it die out on me ? I was looking to buy a GTX970 (no Amd cards) but if the other one wouldn't die i would wait till i can buy a new pc since my old components will be a bottleneck.

This is a picture of how diablo and windows looked with dots:
2ic74v8.jpg
 
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unknownuser

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Thing is i don't want to spend money now if i don't have to. Testing right now with diablo 3, wow (both with max background performance) and furmark running in full max resolution and 8xMSAA, card is at 80 degrees but no artifacts or any problems.
 
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George Phillips

George Phillips

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Cons29 is absolutely correct. I have seen things like this many time. Your GTS250 either needs to be cleaned because of a lot of dust built-up that causes the card to heat up or the GPU has reached it's end of life. If this card worked well and produced fine frame rates, I'd try to take it out, clean it and test it again. If the artifacts still show up, the card will go completely BSOD very soon.
 
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unknownuser

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That's the thing, after that episode with artifacts, it works perfectly and even when it had artifacts was at 67 degrees. Now in stress tests at 80 degrees it still works perfectly and it is clean, no dust.
 
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unknownuser

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Today when i started my pc i didn't have video signal in windows. Restarted the pc got to pin screen entered pin, no signal. Restarted again artifacts appeared on the pin screen but after entering the pin got on to the desktop. Everything was flickering, dots and other artifacts everywhere, the driver crashed and recovered and then all i saw was my desktop made of green dots, i could distinguish the battle.net launcher. I restarted again and now again it works perfectly. No artifacts, no problems in games/furmark. Could it be from the psu ? It's a Sirtec Highpower Bronze II 600w.
 
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Florrowdem

Florrowdem

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I think it may die really really soon, if that happened.
I had an HD 5450 few months back, and i was sometimes getting No signals from the monitor, and it was the graphics card's fault.I didnt wait for it to die and i bought myself another graphics card, that fixed all the issues i had with such problems.
 
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junkeymonkey

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''I was looking to buy a GTX970 (no Amd cards) but if the other one wouldn't die i would wait till i can buy a new pc since my old components will be a bottleneck.
Thing is i don't want to spend money now if i don't have to.''

thing is you could just go with this and be amazed what you get over that 250 ?? and stay at a low price for that older rig

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487024&ignorebbr=1
 
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unknownuser

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Did think of the 750 ti oc but its ~40$ cheaper than gtx 960 (at least in my country) and has the same "problem", only 2gb of memory and i'll probably hate myself for buying a budget video card when i'll switch to a i7 4790k at the end on the year.
Now back to the gts 250. The psu is not to blame since it does artifacts and stuff on other psu. Somebody suggested that it could be from the pci-e slot and so i trying wiggling it a bit and it did produce artifacts and crashed furmark (this was done when i just started the pc, so it didn't have time to "warm up"). So i cleaned both the pci-e slot and the video card connector and tried again. Did manage to produce some artifacts but had to wiggle it good. Now by this development i would say it's the slot but it did have time to warm up so to speak and if it is the slot then why did it produce artifacts when i started the pc today and stopped after "warming up" without me touching it at all ?
 
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unknownuser

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I writing this with wow, diablo 3, hots opened on full background performance and furmark running on max resolution + 8xMSAA, video card is at 98% usage, video memory at 95%, temp at 73 degrees but no artifacts or problems whatsoever. So now i'm guessing it was just the pci-e slot or video card connector that was dirty.
Tbh i'm a bit disappointed, since if it was the video card i would've had a good reason to get a new one.
Thank you very much for your time and help.
 
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JBURNS489

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Dude no offense but you are tricking yourself...your GPU is about to die, like a few others have stated. The problem is going to slowly get worse until you change your graphics card. I highly doubt that dust would cause that many artifacts without a high temp reading. If your temps are fine (which you havr said they are) then it is definitely your graphics card about to die. Start planning a replacement one now.
 
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unknownuser

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As i said i am disappointed it works ok now, but if you say it's gonna die out i do hope you're right. My mind is set on what i'll get as a replacement but i still can't replace it while this one works. I will get a MSI GTX 970 Twin Frozr V Gaming 4GB when this one will die.
 
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unknownofprob

unknownofprob

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"I was looking to buy a GTX970 (no Amd cards) but if the other one wouldn't die i would wait till i can buy a new pc since my old components will be a bottleneck. "

There is only a bottleneck with the CPU if it it currently at or close to 100% usage or throttling at a way too high temperature.

Ram shouldn't be an issue, unless always at 95%+ usage when in the most demanding tasks you currently attend to.

Motherboard wont be an issue, no matter the PCI-E version (PCI-E is backwards compatible)

PSU wont bottleneck but you need to make sure first that you have enough power & amps for your system, and that the quality is decent of the unit.
 
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unknownofprob

unknownofprob

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great to see you've done some research yourself before upgrading, if still using the stock cooler on the CPU I wouldn't overclock too much higher then the base speed. If you haven't re-applied the thermal paste in a year+ I would be doing that as well before any sort of overclock, and for the best thermal dissipation of the cooler.
 
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