6600GT screen flicker?

[undeadsac]

Just updated the drivers to the newest BETA set offered by the NVidia website and whenever I am watching video (MPEG Etc.) in winamp or M$ Player the entire screen goes black and flickers off and comes back on and the mouse image freezes on screen etc. What could be causing this and how can I fix it? This is affecting my AMD system (see sig)

Thanks so much for all the help I've received here on the forum.

I should also mention that its a GIGABYTE 6600GT

 

[compslckr]

was the card working good before?


if so why not just roll back the driver? or try a different driver?

 

[undeadsac]

was the card working good before?


if so why not just roll back the driver? or try a different driver?

that's the thing. I don't really know, the system was so unstable before that I couldn't do anything with it for more than 5 min or so before it rebooted. Its stable now, but on the boot screen i'm getting some artifacting and it flickers when rendering video and its had the "failed to draw" error a couple times when attempting to display pictures from my digital cameras.

 

[UncleMacro]

but on the boot screen i'm getting some artifacting

Do you mean the BIOS screen or the Windows boot screen? If it's the BIOS screen then you've got more than driver problems to deal with. If you boot in "VGA mode" do you still have problems?

 

[undeadsac]

Do you mean the BIOS screen or the Windows boot screen? If it's the BIOS screen then you've got more than driver problems to deal with. If you boot in "VGA mode" do you still have problems?

Its the MOBO Splash (DFI LANPARTY ULTRA D) screen, there is slight artifacting in the center of the screen running horizontally across.

 

[UncleMacro]

Its the MOBO Splash (DFI LANPARTY ULTRA D) screen, there is slight artifacting in the center of the screen running horizontally across.

At that point there are no Windows drivers loaded so it's likely to be bad hardware. Usually horizontal or vertical lines or 2D arrays of dots tend to be bad video RAM. You might as well reseat the video card and flash the motherboard BIOS just in case (don't try to flash it with that video card installed if it crashes a lot) but if you're getting screen artifacts in the BIOS screen, there's just not that many things which can be the cause. You could try to run MemTest86 to test the RAM and boot in safe mode and run Prime95 to make sure your CPU is okay. The best thing would be to try the 6600GT in someone else's machine. If the boot screen artifacting only happens when the machine is warm and not after it's been off for a while then you might be able to blame a badly mounted heatsink, but that's kind of a longshot given that it's just running in 2D mode when booting so it should be pretty cool. It's hard to blame your power supply since it's just in 2D mode and it's 500 watts. Most of the time, artifacts in the BIOS screen means an RMA.

Edit:
You also might as well fire up a motherboard monitor program and check the supply voltages (especially the 12V rail) just in case it's a messed up power supply.

 

[undeadsac]

At that point there are no Windows drivers loaded so it's likely to be bad hardware. Usually horizontal or vertical lines or 2D arrays of dots tend to be bad video RAM. You might as well reseat the video card and flash the motherboard BIOS just in case (don't try to flash it with that video card installed if it crashes a lot) but if you're getting screen artifacts in the BIOS screen, there's just not that many things which can be the cause. You could try to run MemTest86 to test the RAM and boot in safe mode and run Prime95 to make sure your CPU is okay. The best thing would be to try the 6600GT in someone else's machine. If the boot screen artifacting only happens when the machine is warm and not after it's been off for a while then you might be able to blame a badly mounted heatsink, but that's kind of a longshot given that it's just running in 2D mode when booting so it should be pretty cool. It's hard to blame your power supply since it's just in 2D mode and it's 500 watts. Most of the time, artifacts in the BIOS screen means an RMA.

Edit:
You also might as well fire up a motherboard monitor program and check the supply voltages (especially the 12V rail) just in case it's a messed up power supply.

I've been using the NTUNE program just to monitor voltage etc. and it always has the core voltage as a red icon while everything else is blues (or variants) I havent done anything to the card, it shipped at 500mHz core clock and 1000mHz Freq. (at least I think) I could push it down a little if I need to.

 

[undeadsac]

what voltage should my card get, according to ntune its only pulling 1.5v

also, I tried running 3dMark and the computer completely shits itself and freezes or I get between 1-7 FPS during action WTF this is on the AMD system in my sig. Like I said before this is the most problematic system I've ever built or encountered

 

[UncleMacro]

what voltage should my card get, according to ntune its only pulling 1.5v

I don't know where you'd get 1.5 volts on a PCI-Express card. The edge connector actually uses 3.3V and 12V and the actual data part is a low voltage differential pair which monitoring programs probably don't report since it's not a supply line. NTUNE is probably just reporting it wrong. You really just want to check that the main 12 volt supply rail is at a reasonable value since that's where the card sucks up almost all of its power. Have you tried Prime95 (instructions here) just to check out your CPU and the rest?

Your problems sure sound like your video card but unless you have an old PCI video card to stick in there or you can try yours in someone elses machine, you just kind of have to work out what to blame by process of elimination. Before I RMA something, I want to make damn sure that I have the right part so I run just about every test I can think of before giving up. But artifacts in the BIOS screen is hard to blame on anything but the video card if the machine is still capable of booting Windows.

 

[undeadsac]

I don't know where you'd get 1.5 volts on a PCI-Express card. The edge connector actually uses 3.3V and 12V and the actual data part is a low voltage differential pair which monitoring programs probably don't report since it's not a supply line. NTUNE is probably just reporting it wrong. You really just want to check that the main 12 volt supply rail is at a reasonable value since that's where the card sucks up almost all of its power. Have you tried Prime95 (instructions here) just to check out your CPU and the rest?

Your problems sure sound like your video card but unless you have an old PCI video card to stick in there or you can try yours in someone elses machine, you just kind of have to work out what to blame by process of elimination. Before I RMA something, I want to make damn sure that I have the right part so I run just about every test I can think of before giving up. But artifacts in the BIOS screen is hard to blame on anything but the video card if the machine is still capable of booting Windows.

and now, yet another fucking problem, the card goes into BSOD infinite loop error when running 3dMark05 WTF, just RMA now or is there something else that I can do?

 

[UncleMacro]

I'd run Prime95 and MemTest86 first, if for nothing else then to see that the machine can do something right. A flakey CPU or motherboard can cause all sorts of symptoms but yours all seem to point to the video card. I just suggest people run every easy test they can before giving up because I've seen too many people RMA the video board, only to have it returned with a note saying "passed all tests". It happened to me once with a Voodoo 2. You do all the tests you can, make your best guess, and return something. Given all of your symptoms, there's a 97% chance it's the video card, 2% chance it's the power supply, and 1% chance that it's caused by evil gremlins released from Hell by Bill Gates. (That last one came from my experience trying to run Windows ME on the computer in my sig.)

 

[undeadsac]

I'd run Prime95 and MemTest86 first, if for nothing else then to see that the machine can do something right. A flakey CPU or motherboard can cause all sorts of symptoms but yours all seem to point to the video card. I just suggest people run every easy test they can before giving up because I've seen too many people RMA the video board, only to have it returned with a note saying "passed all tests". It happened to me once with a Voodoo 2. You do all the tests you can, make your best guess, and return something. Given all of your symptoms, there's a 97% chance it's the video card, 2% chance it's the power supply, and 1% chance that it's caused by evil gremlins released from Hell by Bill Gates. (That last one came from my experience trying to run Windows ME on the computer in my sig.)

hahah, thanks, I'll try Memtest, its built into the bios on this DFI board and I had run it before when I just had 1GB of Rosewill RAM, it errored out on tests 5-7, but I havent tried it since I've installed the second gig of Corsair, we'll see how it goes tonight!