I think my gfx card is failing

[padren]

I built my computer almost a year ago, I have this gfx card:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162017

 

the problem is it's never done high end 3D stuff very well. I hadn't tried it with much at all, and figured it was an isolated problem or drivers or such. I've updated to all the latest drivers and found that multiple programs (Fallout 3, EVE Online, etc) show the same symptoms.

 

It will run well and fast, and then lock up for a few seconds - 3-30s, and all the textures will become corrupted. At this point it often becomes laggy or will run smooth but with completely corrupt textures. I've also experienced hangs/crashes with video, but otherwise my computer runs perfectly fine. I am using XP pro so I don't have any gfx accel UI features or such.

 

I've been trying to call technical support, but it goes to voicemail which says it's full.

 

I haven't overclocked or anything, and I am seriously considering just getting a new card, but I want to be sure that's the problem before I spend the money. I can post any other components if that is helpful.

 

Any ideas?

[Mr Skeptic]

If you are comfortable with exposing the guts of your computer, I would suggest opening it up and cleaning your graphics card's heat sink. In some designs dust can accumulate rather quickly, and a year is plenty of time for that to happen. Dust of course clogs the heatsink making it unable to release heat so your card quickly overheats.

[JillSwift]

What's your power supply's rated wattage?

[padren]

What's your power supply's rated wattage?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341011

 

Says it's max power is 750W on the specs.

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Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

If you are comfortable with exposing the guts of your computer, I would suggest opening it up and cleaning your graphics card's heat sink. In some designs dust can accumulate rather quickly, and a year is plenty of time for that to happen. Dust of course clogs the heatsink making it unable to release heat so your card quickly overheats.

 

I've blown the dust out many times, but the temperature never says it goes over 50c. I'm pretty comfortable with mucking with the guts and have removed it more than once to check for any signs of damage, burn, and clearing out dust. But from what I can tell, 50c is a really low temperature for a card that's not even idling.

 

 

Edit:

While it seems specific to my graphics, I do notice the only component in the system that gets any bad reviews is the motherboard.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131320

 

I've always had good luck with Asus before - a colleague of mine builds lots of computers and goes with them (he's off in Iraq now, so he can't really help), this is the second system I've built from scratch for myself and I had to replace it's MB with an ASUS one which had no problems.

 

All the components are 11 months old at this time, if that helps.

Edited September 24, 2009 by padren
Consecutive posts merged.

[JillSwift]

It sounds like you have some bad memory on the card, honestly. There's a program to test GPU memory for users of the nVidia Folding@Home program:

 

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadUtils

 

hope this helps

 

_____EDIT_____

Cwap. That's for CUDA capable cards only

Edited September 24, 2009 by JillSwift

[padren]

It sounds like you have some bad memory on the card, honestly. There's a program to test GPU memory for users of the nVidia Folding@Home program:

 

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadUtils

 

hope this helps

 

_____EDIT_____

Cwap. That's for CUDA capable cards only

 

I had to wrangle to get the cudart.dll but once I did it worked. I ran 100 rounds on 256Mb and had zero errors. It's a 512Mb card.

 

That is a great program btw - I've been looking for something like that for some time. Do you think the test is pretty conclusive though? I was pretty sure it would be a bad memory issue too.

 

 

If it's worth noting - I've yet to have vertex data become notably corrupt, though it is a much much smaller amount of data. The textures often appear readable, like the texture data was intended for rendering to something else, like the pointers got all messed up but the data is still more or less intact.

[Dudde]

It looks like on that motherboard there was only 1 PCIx slot, which is probably what the card is hooked into. Normally I'd try another slot, but you can always at least reseat the card in the motherboard.

 

if you're like me and just like troubleshooting, you can also hook the video card into someone else's computer and try letting them run with it for a day to see if the result is reproducable.

[padren]

It looks like on that motherboard there was only 1 PCIx slot, which is probably what the card is hooked into. Normally I'd try another slot, but you can always at least reseat the card in the motherboard.

 

if you're like me and just like troubleshooting, you can also hook the video card into someone else's computer and try letting them run with it for a day to see if the result is reproducable.

 

That's a good idea, I wish my old comp wasn't AGP. Right now I don't have any other cards to test that are PCIe and no other systems I can test it on.

 

It's gotta be the motherboard or the card I think - though, I wonder how those ram tests would pass if it was the motherboard, if it has to go through that to get to the ram.

 

 

Btw, I do appreciate all the advice everyone, this has been frustrating me for quite a whole now.

[Royston]

the problem is it's never done high end 3D stuff very well.

 

It's most probably the card then, a 9800 should have no issues, your PSU is more than adequate, I run two 9 series through SLI on 450 watt with no problems. You've tried older drivers I take it ? Using the latest driver is always taken as gospel, but I had a lot of issues trying to get 190.62 to work...there was a conflict with my motherboard drivers.

 

You shouldn't have much problem with Asus, I have the poor mans version Asrock, and my pc flies graphically. All I can think is your CPU or ram might be bottle necking, but my first impression is that you've bought a faulty gfx card, i.e 'it's never done high end 3D stuff' as you put it. A 9800, should be able to handle pretty much anything that's thrown at it, i.e you should be able to run any recent game with no issues at all.

Edited September 25, 2009 by Snail

[Dudde]

a ha ha I said PCIx, /facepalm

 

anyway. I recently bought a pretty high end card that was rubbish out of the box, not sure what was up with it, but then bought a lower end version of almost the exact card and my computer is in love with it. You may check out an electronic store with a return policy and just try it out - you know, testing the card out and such. If it works, probably the card, if not, probably not the card, and you can even return the card saying it doesn't work!

 

Actually someone at best buy told me to do that, soooo...just following advice