GPU Artifacts?

[AlienZ]

Hello,

recently my GeForce 9800GT started to play tricks on me - games started to freeze and some weird glitches occured.

After a short googling, I found out these might be GPU artifacts (someone correct me if I'm wrong). So, I followed some advices and ran metest and furmark - memtest was passed with no errors and furmark ran for an hour testing gpu stability, reached 80C and still no glitches or anything so I don't think it's heat related (in games I usually get only 60C) nor bad ram. Since re-seating the GPU didn't help as well, I decided to ask for some help. Is there anything I can do here or my 9800GT has gone to Gods and should be rerplaced? The card has been used for more than 2 years, manufactured by Point of View, never overclocked. Gliches occurs on all games played so far.

 

[skolpo]

Well, if glitches occur in all games, then most likely the card is running its last course. Or, you can try different drivers for the thing. Wouldn't hurt.

 

[AlienZ]

I forgot to mention I tried to roll back to older drivers and even tried clean install of newest ones - didn't help.

 

[skolpo]

Then we can conclude it's either the card going bad, OC is too high (if you OC at all), or PSU might be going bad. I was never a fan of Furmark as a stability test since one time for a GTX 285 I had, I was able to run Furmark for hours on end but could not run Crysis for more than 20 minutes. Turns out to be a bad graphics card nonetheless. What drivers are you using? Some people say that the beta drivers before 260.99 is pretty stable.

What you can also do is try cleaning the card of any dust particles that might be sitting on it. If it's too dusty, it can cause some issues.

 

[AlienZ]

I'm now running 260.99 and as mentioned in 1st post - not OC at all. It also sounds like I won't trust Furmark no more, because it usually takes no longer than 15 minutes to get gliches in any game, but Furmark runs fine for a hour and even more. Are there any other good GPU stability test tools? And how can I check my PSU? If I had spare GPU and PSU, it would be easyer to find what's the issue I guess. Also, I reinstalled Windows XP a few days ago. On Windows 7 I never got these glitches, but then I had different issue - screen turned black for several seconds and after that, following message was shown:

 

[skolpo]

^That almost for sure tells me that it is a driver issue or the card is going bad. I'm going to be on the safe side and say it's a driver issue.

Try the 258 beta:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

 

[AlienZ]

OK, since 258 beta didn't work:

I assume I should save up for a new card.

 

[skolpo]

Yikes, sorry that you're still dealing with troubles. Yea, it should be a graphics card issue. You can positively conclude that it is if you test the graphics card in another system to see if the same problem occurs. Otherwise, it can also be a motherboard of PSU issue. I'm leaning towards the graphics card being the problem, but it's better to know for sure now rather than later when you buy a new card and realize it's a problem with something else.

 

[AlienZ]

OK, thank's for your advices!

 

[AlienZ]

Best answer selected by AlienZ.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey