Paperchase

I was running those NGO modified Catalyst 7.3 (I think) Drivers when this first happened. Then I switched to using Omegas and eventually vanilla ATI ones. The heatsink of my 9800 Pro is warm to the touch, but not hot enough for artifacts to appear, usually. Every 3D game I played gives me artifacts. Solutions anyone?

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|TG-Irr|Paperchase

sc1ence

underclock the card and see if artifacts dissapear. nearly 100% of the time you see artifacts it is due to overheating.

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Paperchase

Well, I know that it is not overheating. Right after I started my PC after leaving it off until the heatsink was cold to the touch, loaded up STALKER and boom, artifacts everywhere. Same result with Dawn of War and other games I have tried.

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|TG-Irr|Paperchase

Hambergler

My experience is once the artifacts appear the card is not revivable. I went through 4 cards in one year once. An electrician explained to me that when the electricity spikes or dips the sign waves get cut off or are abnormal and it makes the components work twice as hard to keep working properly producing massive amounts of heat. The solution was an uninterruptible power supply. It can also be the power supply going out or not producing enough power, or it can be the drivers. I try never to overclock my cards, they are just too sensitive. Like Sc1ence mentioned you can try underclocking, but I would go ahead and order a new card.

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sc1ence

vid cards heat up and cool down within a second. use a program to record heat levels over time. in the nvidia control panel there is a way to record temps over time iirc. this may be an ntune feature.

once heat has dammaged your card, you will get these artifacts at lower and lower temps.

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Satertek

Yea grab Rivatuner (or ATI Tool if you're running Vista), lower the memory and core clocks a bit (50MHz or so) and see if you get the same results. Also open up Rivatuner's monitor and see how hot its getting.

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JAMerica

Atitools is quite good. It also has a "scan for artifacts" feature and allows you to watch the temperature while it scans. It will also find the maximum clock speeds that your card can operate at with no errors.

The only other thing that has caused me troubles if, when overclocking your cpu, you also may be overclocking your pci/agp slot, but it doesn't sound like your overclocking anything.

I have to agree with Hambergler, sounds like it's time for a new card.