In need of a new video card.

[rfatcheric]

I will be visiting an old computer shop that I used to work for tonight to do some troubleshooting. What I'm looking to do is test my card in another system to see if it has the same problems. The issue I'm going to run into though is making it crash. Is there anything that someone can recommend that will push the video aside from just playing a agame like crysis? Is there a benchmark program or stress test program I can run that might do the trick? I've tried the ATItool test thing, but that doesn't cause problems, it only seems like graphic intense games at 16x10 or higher cause problems, if I run at a lower res w/ no eye candy it seems to do ok as of now, but I think its slowly dying.

It used to be that if I ran a game like WoW in windowed mode it wouldn't crash, but now even then its starting to cause artifacts even windowed after a certain period of time.

At this point I hope it is the video card, if its something else I think I'll wind up going w/out a computer for a while till I can upgrade the whole thing, no sense in replacing a mobo or chip at this point.

 

[rfatcheric]

A good item to try is remove the stock cooler, clean off ALL the stock goop, and reapply with a good thermal paste. Maybe the GPU is being cooler well, but not the RAM. The Artifacts would be from overheating or bad video RAM.

This is a great idea, I never thought of that. Would AS5 be good to use on a GPU? Its all I have laying around, leftover from the cpu. Or is there some other kind of paste thats better for GPUs?

 

[ohiou_grad_06]

Though if you wanted, for 200 you put together a cheap AMD system. So if it's something else, it may not be as bad as you think. If you have a lot of parts to reuse.

 

[jay2tall]

This is a great idea, I never thought of that. Would AS5 be good to use on a GPU? Its all I have laying around, leftover from the cpu. Or is there some other kind of paste thats better for GPUs?

I've tried many kinds of paste. As long as it is a good thermal paste they are all the same. AC5 is expensive for how little you get, but yeah it should do the trick. Much look and see if the RAM has those FAT squishy pads, you may need to try and salvage them if they don't come in direct contact with the heatsink. Let us know

 

[rfatcheric]

I will post an update tomorrow. I'm gonig to a computer shop I used to work at to do some troubleshooting and figure out what the deal is.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help.

 

[rfatcheric]

Video card is bad Used a new video card to test, and everything was fine. Put my old card in another system and it had the same problems in the same timeframe that occured in mine.

Guess its time for a 8800GTS g92

Thanks again for all the help

 

[jay2tall]

Video card is bad Used a new video card to test, and everything was fine. Put my old card in another system and it had the same problems in the same timeframe that occured in mine.

Guess its time for a 8800GTS g92

Thanks again for all the help

Yeah it's time to put the ol girl down. The new GTS is a great replacement. They are rock solid and run like a champ.