UNIQUE Video Artifacting Problem! About to quit with computers...

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Jan 17, 2004
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I've posted threads about different aspects of this problem, and thought I'd get a single thread to sum up what I know so far. I really do hope someone here will know what's going on.

A few months ago, I bought an x850XT. It played great for a few weeks until I started noticing artifacts in games. I would run ATI Tool artifacts test, but would get no artifacts detected, even when I ran artifact test along with Prime95 for a half hour.

This was when I had an Intel system.

I decided to RMA the video card for a new one, and everything worked great, as I recall it, for a week or so. Those dreaded artifacts began showing. Sometimes the old fashioned "dot" or "block" artifacts, but most of the time, they were geometry stretched across game maps. In DOD:Source, even, I had building textures that were stained green or red, and wood textures that would be very bright (almost to the point that they were white). I figure, it might be another faulty card, but that would be quite the coincidence.

A few days ago, I put together a new AMD system, in which I replaced the PSU, motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

Ran memtest86 to make sure RAM was functioning, and it is.

STILL I get artifacts.

The things that remained the same in the system are the video card, monitor, and hard drive.

A day after having the new system, along with the fresh install of Windows, etc., my hard drive corrupted the data needed to boot.

Here I am on yet another fresh Windows install. I have updated everything in a logical order, and every driver is up-to-date, as well as my Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.

A 74GB Raptor is on its way and due Tuesday, but I'm really worried, as I never heard of a hard drive causing graphical corruption before.

Please, if anyone has any input here, I'm at wit's end. :confused:
 
Freaky. I got problems like that to. Raven Shield once stopped showing brushes (Game geometry that is not made in a seprate program) when I changed moniters. Very wierd. I wish I could help.
 
Did you ever try hooking the pc up to another monitor to see if there was something wrong with yours?
 
Malogato said:
I'm thinking that there is some sort of interference going on here.
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I can't imagine what kind. Cell phone isn't anywhere near, and this computer had this problem in both homes (I moved recently).
 
I recommend putting a fan directly on that videocard, however you can manage to get one on it. What kind of power supply is it that you have? Watts != power in PSU's. And some brands should be avoided like the plague entirely.

 
tsuehpsyde said:
I recommend putting a fan directly on that videocard, however you can manage to get one on it. What kind of power supply is it that you have? Watts != power in PSU's. And some brands should be avoided like the plague entirely.

Click to expand...
My entire system is in my sig. It's an OCZ Powerstream 520W,
 
slithy said:
Did you ever try hooking the pc up to another monitor to see if there was something wrong with yours?
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Tried it just now, and am getting the same artifacts. :(
 
For reference, here is what I am dealing with:

screenshot0014ri.jpg


screenshot0025ak.jpg
 
O M F G. I wish I was much of an help. Geez, sorry man, but that looks fucking sick.

AMD64 3700+ San Diego
ASRock 939 AGP + PCI-e Future-Proofed
Patriot 1x1024mb DDR RAM
ATI Radeon x850XT 256mb AGP
Creative Labs Audigy 2 (Try removing this to see if it helps)
Plextor DVD(+/-)R/RW48x12x4x16x (Dunno about that, but I'm sure CD drives don't interfere game performance)
Lite-On DVD/CD-RW Combo 48x24x48x16x
OCZ Powerstream 520w (Check in Everest Home Edition to see if you're getting enough power in the 12v rail)
74GB WD Raptor SATA150 Main Drive
40GB Maxtor ATA133 Storage Drive
 
stupid question.. but..

"Nothing overclocked?"

This is the exact sort of artifacts I get when I overclock too far.
 
Malogato said:
stupid question.. but..

"Nothing overclocked?"

This is the exact sort of artifacts I get when I overclock too far.
Click to expand...
Hehe. Just to let you guys know, there's no such thing as a stupid question in this thread. Although what I'm having here is a stupid problem. :rolleyes:

Nothing is overclocked. :)
 
Mr. Stryker said:
AMD64 3700+ San Diego
ASRock 939 AGP + PCI-e Future-Proofed
Patriot 1x1024mb DDR RAM
ATI Radeon x850XT 256mb AGP
Creative Labs Audigy 2 (Try removing this to see if it helps)
Plextor DVD(+/-)R/RW48x12x4x16x (Dunno about that, but I'm sure CD drives don't interfere game performance)
Lite-On DVD/CD-RW Combo 48x24x48x16x
OCZ Powerstream 520w (Check in Everest Home Edition to see if you're getting enough power in the 12v rail)
74GB WD Raptor SATA150 Main Drive
40GB Maxtor ATA133 Storage Drive
Click to expand...
I thought software was never an accurate way to measure rails? This is a brand new PSU from a reputable company, and I do not have access to a multimeter. :(

But I'll remove my Audigy right now and see if it helps any.
 
definately try another powersupply it may be the main cause of your artifacts. i would recommend borrowing a psu and try it out.

if you cant do that anytime soon. i recommend unpluggin your system to the bare essentials and try it and see if you still have this issue.
 
TrueRush said:
definately try another powersupply it may be the main cause of your artifacts. i would recommend borrowing a psu and try it out.

if you cant do that anytime soon. i recommend unpluggin your system to the bare essentials and try it and see if you still have this issue.
Click to expand...
I basically did that when I bought this new PSU. The old one served me just as well as this one does. If it even matters, software shows me a reading on the 12v of 12.24 (approximately).

As for bare essentials, I will try that right now.

NOTE TO A PREVIOUS REPLY: Taking out the Audigy2 did not solve the issue. :(

Keep the input coming guys, I'm willing to try anything.
 
For what it's worth, here are my video card temperatures in an ATI Tool Artifact Scan. This is on stock cooling and not overclocking.

Idle: 40
Load: ~74

Seems a little high to me, but would 74 honestly cause artifacts?

A thing to note is, that Artifact Scan likely does not take any hard drive resources while it is running. My best guess in this whole FUBAR problem, is that the hard drive is not "at its best" and is feeding corrupt data to the video card.

But that guess is somewhat rejected by the fact that I ran PowerMax (a bootable diagnostics tool made by Maxtor) and every test, including Advanced and Burn-In checked out fine and passed.

:confused: W :confused: T :confused: F :confused:
 
Alright, bare minimums did not work. I used a video card, the one stick of 1gb RAM I have (by the way I HAVE tested different RAM), CPU (obviously), my SATA boot drive, and the Lite-On CD/DVD drive.

NO CIGAR :confused:
 
May be a silly question, but is Fast Writes turned off? I'm not sure if this applies to PCI-E boards, but as yours is AGP and PCI-E it might :confused:
 
That powersupply should be rock solid...but I do recommend getting a multimeter to test those rails and adjust accordingly.

Hmm...perhaps uninstall drivers, use driver cleaner to remove the rest of the driver traces in XP, and re-install the absolute newest drivers? I used to think it wasn't neccessary, but I've had incidents where I diddn't do every step how I should and my card pulled slower (like 1k less marks in 3DMark05).

Uninstall drivers in Windows.
Reboot.
Boot into windows in safe-mode
Use Driver Cleaner PE to remove Ati files.
Reboot.
Install newest ATi drivers.
Reboot.

See if that does it...at least if that doesn't do it, we know it's not drivers at all.

 
Shadow27 said:
May be a silly question, but is Fast Writes turned off? I'm not sure if this applies to PCI-E boards, but as yours is AGP and PCI-E it might :confused:
Click to expand...
I've with Fast Writes both on and off.
 
The Powerstream has adjustable rail voltages through "screws" on the back of the PSU. Check to see that all three of the LEDs are green, if they show up as anything else they are either over or under powered.
 
Yep, rails are untouched since I've bought it, and indicators are lit green. As for cleaning up drivers, I've done countless Windows re-installs with fresh install of Catalyst 5.10's. All drivers are clean and properly configured as far as I know.

Here is some temperature and volt info I gathered from Everest:


Sensor Properties:
Sensor Type Winbond W83627HF (ISA 290h)
GPU Sensor Type National LM63 (ATI-I2C 4Ch)

Temperatures:
Motherboard 34 °C (93 °F)
CPU 34 °C (93 °F)
Aux 24 °C (75 °F)
GPU 40 °C (104 °F)
GPU Ambient 40 °C (104 °F)
Maxtor 6Y080M0 39 °C (102 °F)

Cooling Fans:
CPU 3245 RPM

Voltage Values:
CPU Core 1.44 V
Aux 1.54 V
+3.3 V 3.34 V
+5 V 5.21 V
+12 V 12.46 V
-12 V 1.95 V
-5 V 2.69 V
+5 V Standby 5.14 V
VBAT Battery 3.09 V
Debug Info F FF 34 FF
Debug Info T 34 34 24
Debug Info V 59 61 D1 C2 CD CE D0 (01)
 
Might seem silly, but try running without a cd/dvd drive plugged in, or with a different one that you tried before.

A friend of mine recently had a problem where it took forever to load windows, and it turned out to be his dvd drive, even though there was no disc in the drive on bootup.

Astaroth
 
just a note : I dont trust memtest at all anymore. I was having BSOD issues that at first I suspected was either video or memory related (it seemed like memory but 75% of the issues windows said was graphics driver related). The memory could pass a 48 hour run of memtest86+ with ease and no errors what-so-ever. However it failed Prime95 within 30 minutes, loosening the memory timings has fixed all of my problems.

You said you ran torture tests for artifacts for 30 minutes...try running Prime95, rthdrbl or other stress tests over night. The longer the better. This may help you to single out the faulty component(s).
 
I'd be willing to bet it might be harddrive related...I've has some weird problems due to bad hard drives. You said your raptor was coming in, I'd hope that would fix your problems.
 
That Hard drive corrupted on you, I would bet that the corruption is an issue with the hard drive. Replace++.

~Adam
 
Haven't read the whole thread as of yet but I had a similar issue when I picked up my X850XT. The stock cooler runs at 18% fan speed at default and will raise up to 80% or 90% when it hits it's "thermal danger zone". Now this leaves you with a huge gap. In my case, my X850XT's idle temperature is around 35c. That means that anywhere between that 35c up to 80c, the fan will run at 18% which used to cause massive artifacting in my rig.

What I did was this: download and install ATITool and head into Settings. Scroll down to Fan Control and check the "Do not change PWM frequency" box (or your fan will hiss like crazy). Now, for the 0c box, make your fan speed about 20%. That means that from anyone in between 0c and the next value you enter, your fan speed will remain a constant 20%. The next value I set was at 40c. That setting would mean that I'm not gaming yet, but my room temperatures are a bit higher so I set the fan speed at 30% which is still very quiet but offers better cooling.

My next margin was at 45c. Now I'm gaming. Fan speed jumps up to 40%.
The next steps go like so: 5c increase in heat, 6-10% in fan speed until it hits 70c in which case the fan jumps to 100% to protect the chip in case of overheating.

Anywho, doing this solved my problems and I hope it'll help you out. If it doesn't, I would dis-assemble the cooler and apply some AS5 just to make sure. The stock paste was applied pretty badly and seemingly splotched on. Good luck!
 
I had problems exactly like that a few years ago. Turned out to be a conflict between my gigabyte mb and the cheapo geforce 2 mx card I had. A bios update solved it for most games, but not all.
 
daedal said:
Haven't read the whole thread as of yet but I had a similar issue when I picked up my X850XT. The stock cooler runs at 18% fan speed at default and will raise up to 80% or 90% when it hits it's "thermal danger zone". Now this leaves you with a huge gap. In my case, my X850XT's idle temperature is around 35c. That means that anywhere between that 35c up to 80c, the fan will run at 18% which used to cause massive artifacting in my rig.

What I did was this: download and install ATITool and head into Settings. Scroll down to Fan Control and check the "Do not change PWM frequency" box (or your fan will hiss like crazy). Now, for the 0c box, make your fan speed about 20%. That means that from anyone in between 0c and the next value you enter, your fan speed will remain a constant 20%. The next value I set was at 40c. That setting would mean that I'm not gaming yet, but my room temperatures are a bit higher so I set the fan speed at 30% which is still very quiet but offers better cooling.

My next margin was at 45c. Now I'm gaming. Fan speed jumps up to 40%.
The next steps go like so: 5c increase in heat, 6-10% in fan speed until it hits 70c in which case the fan jumps to 100% to protect the chip in case of overheating.

Anywho, doing this solved my problems and I hope it'll help you out. If it doesn't, I would dis-assemble the cooler and apply some AS5 just to make sure. The stock paste was applied pretty badly and seemingly splotched on. Good luck!
Click to expand...

Tried setting fan at 100% and ran some games... still have artifacts :(

Looks like the only thing left is to wait for that Raptor to come in. If that doesn't fix things (knock on wood) then another ATI RMA will be done. I'll keep you guys posted, as everyone can learn from this RIDICULOUS problem.
 
those artifacts look like the memory is overheating.

i get that shit when mine is overclocked + too hot.

mind you, im talking about vram here :p

get a high CFM fan and have it blow over the back of the card to remove excess heat from teh back of the card. see if that helps at all, it should.
 
That artifacting looks identical to problems I had years ago with a ti4200. Turned out one of the clips on the heatsink was damaged and the memory was overheating.
 
Quoting Volume "A few days ago, I put together a new AMD system, in which I replaced the PSU, motherboard, CPU, and RAM."

Okay, here's my take on this. It can't be your new PSU Mobo, Cpu or ram. It has be something that followed the old sytem to the new. That means it could be; your vid card, sound card(not really u removed it b4, already ruled out) Hard Drive. So here is where we stand

AMD64 3700+ San Diego ***NOPE***
ASRock 939 AGP + PCI-e Future-Proofed *** NOPE***
Patriot 1x1024mb DDR RAM ****NOPE****
ATI Radeon x850XT 256mb AGP
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ****NOPE****
Plextor DVD(+/-)R/RW48x12x4x16x
Lite-On DVD/CD-RW Combo 48x24x48x16x
OCZ Powerstream 520w **** NOPE****
74GB WD Raptor SATA150 Main Drive (Not sure if arrived yet)
40GB Maxtor ATA133 Storage Drive

Update the firmware for both of your optical drives, Check bios settings and make sure everything is okay there. E.G. Primary video is agp not pcie, assign irq to vga is yes agp apperture is set to 256 or greater. Try bumping up the AGP voltage from default 1.5 to 1.6 for testing purposes.
 
Drivers?!

My 6600gt would only run on 66.9x drivers, anything else would artifact. Until i found driver cleaner pro, google it.

Uninstall via control panel ---> reboot to safe mode, driver clean -----> reboot to regular windows and install new ones.
 
I have a X800 XT and from what I see in those screenshots I remember I had the exact same problem but only happened in Doom 3. For me the artifacts appeared after I went from Cat 5.7 to 5.8 without using DriverCleaner. So I uninstalled the driver and used Driver Cleaner and then installed Cat 5.8 and everything has been fine.

But you said you did a fresh install of everthing so I don't know...
 
mdameron & frosti. No offense at all guys but at this point volume is on his millionth reformat and did use driver cleaner already. Especially after reformatting getting everything right and installing catalyst 5.10 as the first and only driver his system has ever known at this point it seems like a hardware problem.
 
I don't know whether to laugh or to throw my computer out the window...

Got the Raptor today... NO HELP AT ALL.

Guess it's been ATI's fault all along. I guess I've just been naive in thinking that a company with such a good reputation in warranties would send me a bad card to replace one.
 
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