Video Card, HD, or PSU problem.....

[josh609]

Hello everyone,
I'm having some issues playing games. I've updated my video card drivers and everything else in windows 7 is up to date. The first issue i've been having is textures in Starcraft 2 would start messing up. Multi-colored or just wrong lay-out. Now i'm having a problem playing games or anything that requires any amount of 3d graphics: bad company 2, SC2, and even Google Earth. games or programs just freeze for a few moments, and then they come back. At least in SC2 they do........at times. At times i've had to reset my computer. The sounds still continues to run while playing the game, but my monitor flickers and a weird design comes upThe, and then my monitor goes black for a moment, and sometimes SC2 will resume and everything is fine, until it does it again. Periods between this happening can be several times a match to maybe once every 2-3 matches in SC2. I think i narrowed it down to either a bad video card or a dying PSU.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.2Ghz
Radeon 4870 1GB
OCZ Gamextreme 600 watter.
6GB of Memory

I've had my computer for a little over 4 years now. The graphics card is probably around 2 years old, while the PSU and CPU are over 4 years old. So perhaps the PSU isn't supplying sufficient power to the video card or perhaps the video card is just dying? I haven't overclocked the video card......I'm not sure what to do.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated!

 

[450]

Do you have another GPU or PSU to test with?

 

[Ultima99]

Yeah video or psu. Have you check the temps and cleaned the heatsink lately?

Most likely its the video card going bad, but you should try to test it in another system if you can.

 

[josh609]

Yeah video or psu. Have you check the temps and cleaned the heatsink lately?

Most likely its the video card going bad, but you should try to test it in another system if you can.

I've been leaving the side of my case open hoping if it were over heating it wouldn't get too hot considering how cool my apartment is. My computer is perfectly stable outside of playing games. I have an Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard. My Gpu reads at the desktop 65C. Is that a good temperature? I'm reading it with Catalyst control center.

 

[josh609]

Do you have another GPU or PSU to test with?

Unfortunately I do not.

 

[Ultima99]

My Gpu reads at the desktop 65C. Is that a good temperature? I'm reading it with Catalyst control center.

65C for idle at desktop is a bit hot. What do you get during games?

 

[samuelmorris]

65C is de rigeur for 4870s, that's how they ran, how they always ran. They weren't very efficient cards at idle and the fan speed was kept low for quietness.

 

[FOKS MULDER]

I would try to stress the cpu first and then the gpu, maybe you could stress with prime 95 and look for errors or bsod, I just remembered, 1 year ago i bought this patriot viper memory and my computer was crashing and artifacting a little bit in some games, changed my memory for a corsair and the pc run perfectly, when it was the psu which was bad, generally the computer would reset (no artifacting), try testing your memory with memtest or the memory utility if you have win7, and check your temps under load for your gpu, you may use gpuz, sometimes simply taking out everything and cleaning does the job, reseat your ram ..Good luck.

 

[War Zone]

I would have to say video card as well, iv seen that problem many times over.
Real pain as far as i know is that theirs no way to do video memory testing like main system memory testing last i checked.

As well i have to ask are you or have you in the past overclocked the ram on your video card and if so how high did you go.
And do you know what make and model and brand of ram is being used on the video card in question,this means you would have had to have taken off the heat sink at some point.