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X850XT: Damaged by ESD or it something else?

D

daedal

Gawd
Joined
May 10, 2005
Messages
686
About a week ago or so, I was cleaning my TV which was connected to my PC via S-video when an ESD discharge from the TV screen struck my rig, blowing the motherboard in the process. I swapped the board two days after and luckily, everything worked flawlessly. Nothing but the motherboard seemed to have taken a hit.

A few days after, I started to notice that World of WarCraft was artifacting in specific objects, namely trees and walls which produced stretched out polygons. Thinking it might be heat related, I used ATITool but bump my fan's speed up a few notches to no avail. I tried downclocking the card drastically (down to 330 some on both core and mem from the 500 some stock) which did seem to help but only if I underclocked the card prior to entering WoW. If I was playing and then underclocked, I was still getting artifacts until I restarted the game. I since then replaced the cooler with an ATI Silencer 5 Rev 2 bunbled with AS5 which dropped the core's peek temperatures to sub 50c, usually 48c or 49c max which is pretty low for an X850XT but I still seem to be getting those artifacts.

A few questions: should I have formatted my rig when I swapped my motherboard? It's the same board but I have not updated the BIOS on it yet. Could that have any sort of affect? Do you guys think something fried when my motherboard got hit? Other games seem to be working without a hitch. Keep in mind that I used to have a similar artifacting problem when I first got the card but I can't remember what I did to resolve the issue. Could this be a driver issue? So far, I've tried Omegas 5.10a, Zeropoint 5.11 and Catalyst 5.11.

My CPU is overclocked but the video is not. I have tested to see if that could be the issue but the error occurs on all clocks, including stock speed.
Here are my specs, I appreciate your input. Let me know if you need any additional info.

Pentium 4E (Prescott) 3.0Ghz @ 3.6ghz w/ divider
4x 512mb (2 gig) Corsair Value Select Dual-Channel DDR400 RAM
Built-by-ATI X850XT w/ ATI Silencer 5, Rev 2 and Artic Silver 5 (Cat. 5.11)
ASUS P4P800E-Deluxe motherboard, not sure of BIOS Rev.
Creative Audigy 2 ZS Sound w/ 5.1 Altec Lansing Speakers
Western Digital Raptor 74g (Primary) and Caviar 80g (Storage)
OCZ Modstream 520w Power Supply
Generic DVD-burner and Wi-Fi PCI card
 
If your other games are fine, and this was a previous issue that you resolved, I would think it has something to do with the motherboard's BIOS and settings. Update the BIOS to the same one you had before, and go over those settings. Try things like making sure FastWrites is off, and that you disable video BIOS shadowing.
 
Never really had any problems with Fastwrites so far.
I'll try that BIOS update and Shadowing setting when I get home. Thanks.
 
I tried downclocking my card again and the artifacts still appeared.
I don't think it's related to the ESD I had because I have no other symptoms.
Upgrading BIOS now.
 
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