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High-end graphics going wonkyFollow

#1 Nov 11 2007 at 6:02 PM Rating: Decent
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I can't for the life of me figure this out. I have an ATI Radeon 1900XTX video card, which should be able to at least run the newest games at medium settings. How come it seems that whenever I push it, I begin to get excessively messed up graphics that cause games to devolve to the point of unplayability? Half-Life 2: EP2, the UT3 demo, WoW when I don't have it in Windowed Mode, TF2, Civ4... they all suffer. My drivers are up to date and I have 2GB of fairly high-end RAM. They still run smoothly, they just look like this:

Screenshot

This kinda shows what's happening, but it tends to get much, much worse that that.

It generally starts off normal, then progresses to worse, and worse, and worse, until the game literally becomes unplayable and I quit. Oh, and I'm not sure why, but I've never seen it happen in an RTS, if that helps. Smiley: tongue

Edited, Nov 11th 2007 11:11pm by DodoBird
#2 Nov 12 2007 at 4:13 PM Rating: Excellent
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You may want to take a look at your settings in device manager. You may have ended up with a video card and a sound card or network card sharing an IRQ address. While this is a perfectly valid setup, and one that windows likes to sneak in there, it can lead to problems with games.

It could also be a ram issue. You might want to run ramcheck.
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#3 Nov 20 2007 at 2:37 PM Rating: Excellent
I know this is a bit of a bump -- but I'd also check to make sure you aren't overheating too badly.
#4 Dec 15 2007 at 4:46 PM Rating: Decent
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Sorry to bump this, but I finally got around to troubleshooting a bunch of stuff, and unfortunately have yet to find a solution. I'm not sure if the problem has gotten worse, but it has gotten increasingly obvious. Crysis and the newest EVE patch both lock up and force a restart within minutes of starting them.

I found that my video card is, in fact, sharing an IRQ address... with a firewire port that I never use. Doubtful that this is causing anything.

I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, and it didn't turn up any problems.

Which leaves overheating. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is the case, but I've done some extensive work and I haven't managed to fix anything. For reference, this is pretty much my case, the specs there are identical except for the fact that mine has an AMD AM2 socket instead of the Intel.

I messed around a bit and I realized that all of the fans were blowing air out. For starters, I switched a couple of them around. I also used some of that plastic that toys are always impossibly difficult to get out of to redirect air flow, as my video card is freaking huge and messed up what seemed to be the intended flow of the case. I also went into the BIOS and told the fans to work harder more often. Finally, I cleaned out any and all dust I could find with a can of compressed air. I live in an old house with bad ventilation, so the stuff accumulates quickly and can really cause adverse effects if you let it. Still, if I go into the BIOS after something bad happens, I find that my CPU is running at a good 54° C. Not good.

Unfortunately, I also cannot continuously monitor the temperature of my computer, at least to my knowledge. MBM is not compatible with my motherboard.

Anyone have any bright ideas as to how I could improve this?
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