Colorful blinking pixels and random video driver failure

[Nellian]

Hi guys =D

I am posting here because I suspect I am having a hardware issue
here are the specs I know ^^'

OS-Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

Processor- AMD Phenom II X4 940

Graphics- ATI Radeon HD 4800
RAM- 4
Power supply-750w


The Problem

I started getting green and purple pixels flickering on my screen that at first I hardly noticed, they progressively got worse!

Now I can hardly function on my pc at times and a whole rainbow of colored pixels have introduced themselves onto the scene including white lines that look like scan lines.
Usually specific colored pixels only pop up on a single color EX. Yellow pixels appear on white ,and Purple on dark colors.

When I play videos the screen goes black and colored pixels flicker. Strangely enough when my screen saver video comes on it is perfectly clear.

another thing that just started happening is when I open a drop down menu or scroll across the icons on my desktop the item I roll my pointer across become "highlighted" in blue and sometimes flicker.

Once in a while the screen goes blank and an error message pops up informing me the video driver just crashed but it fixed itself. Twice this happened and my pc also turned itself off and when it came back on I got a blue screen telling me it crashed due to video blah blah blah sorry I can't remember what it said I should have written it down.


I tried to explain my issue as much as I could, Do you guys think it is a hardware problem? Do I need a new graphics card?



Thanks for reading

[Nellian]

Took a screen shot
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y66/HateMemeow/***.jpg
Please ignore the messy desktop

oh wow, I can't post the link because it contains W T F where the three stars are

[Tyree]

Brand & Model of the 750W PSU.

[Timer5]

Well from what I can tell it is either Your PSU is bad. Or Your card is overheating. The HD4800 is famous for it's overheating problems. So try to clean it out with canned air.

Try to clean it out and tell us if that worked.

[Nellian]

Hmm no one has mentioned that it might be the psu so far

Thermaltake Toughpower 750W

its this one
Thermaltakeusa*»*Power Supply*»*Toughpower Series*»*Toughpower Cable Management 750W PSU : Toughpower Cable Management 750W PSU W0116RU

And as for the card overheating some friends of mine mentioned that might be a problem so I cleaned it out really well and for about an hour it reduced it but then it went back to being all messed up. It is getting plenty of air, I need to replace 2 fans in my system but it has 4 more fans. I monitor the temp and it never goes above 30c

The pixels seemed to randomly subside yesterday so I opened up game to test it out. I opened Civilization 5 and within a few turns the pixels and lines were back and the game crashed.

If it is the card then I'm looking at getting this one

Newegg.com - ASUS HD7850-DC2-2GD5 Radeon HD 7850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

I need something that will run GW2 and a few other games.

Someone also mentioned that it might be bad ram
so I picked out some low profile ram that should fit in my case
Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory Model KHX1600C9D3K2/8G
I needed more ram anyway

[Timer5]

Here use this PSU it is way better and higher quality.

Newegg.com - CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 650W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply

And yes I do recommend that new Video Card you will get much better performance. Also a bit more ram would help a bit. but you don't really need more than like 6GB but it is up to you.