Hey all. I just joined this forum in hopes of getting my computer on the path to where it used to be. I suspect that the video card is at fault, as it is the obvious thing to blame.
Warning: Sorry about the picture quality, taken with my phone.
Here are my Computer Specs:
AMD Phenom II x 4 3.2GHz Quad Core
M4A79XTD EVO Motherboard
8GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance RAM
XFX GeForce 9800GT Video Card
Rosewill Stallion 500w 2.2ATX Power Supply
Things to know:
I've had this 9800GT for a little over a two years now. No problems until now.
About a week ago I purchased a new monitor.
Old Monitor's Specs: Gateway 19in 1440x900
New Monitor's Specs: Acer 23in 1920x1080
I'm going to go through the week as it happened in order to clarify events and to help have a better understanding of what I am dealing with.
A week ago:
Purchased new monitor. Got home, plugged it in, and started playing CoD MW2. No problem. The larger screen was nice.
3 days later:
Was playing CoD MW2. Got kicked out of the game. Windows flagged the error as a "Driver display error" in the bottom right hand corner. Naturally, the first thing I did was to take the rest of the day learning how to properly uninstall/install the video drivers. I completed this process at least two times with no avail. After I re-installed the drivers, I would run CoD MW2 to see if it would work. I received several Blue Screens of Death and shutdowns/freezes from this. This would only happen in video intensive programs/events. My video issues didn't quite look like the "textbook video card errors". There were blocks of pixels that were transformed to the wrong area. Picture of what it was like.
Next day:
I was kicked from CoD MW2 a little bit after I left a hacked lobby. In hacked lobbies, you can basically download acheivements from the host. So, at the time, I thought that maybe I got a virus from said lobby. So I ran Anti-Virus software. Deleted 2 viruses from my computer. Then, once again, re-installed the video drivers. Nothing. At this point I thought it was more of a software corruption issue that I was not addressing. And at this point I was pretty frustrated, so I wanted to pull this problem out by the roots. So, I wipe my Hard Drive clean and re-installed Win 7 HP. I installed the latest video drivers, and downloaded CoD. I started playing, and it worked for about 10 seconds, and then it froze up... I was so angry that i threw my new monitor against the wall and shattered the hell out of it. Ok, no. Just kidding. I've read other posts and saw that other video cards malfunctioned because of heating issues. So i decided to go dual monitors (Old-Playing CoD, New-GPU Monitoring software), and take a picture of my GPU specs whenever it crashes. (seemed like a damn good idea at the time!) Here's a picture of what I got.
Later that night I was messing around, trying to fix it. Restarted it, and the restart screen looked like this.
Today:
I decided to clean out the dust, if any, in the gpu. Heck, I also cleaned out my dust filters for my computer fans. After turning on, this is what the screen looked like. First time I've seen it like this.
Anyways, after I put everything together, the Microsoft Recovery start-up starts up. It says that it started up because of an unexpected hardware or software change. I didn't ADD and new hardware to it. So it must be like a corrupted software change? I have no clue. It says that it can't "repair" the issue automatically. When I try to start up my computer with "Regular Settings", the computer is unable to do so and just restarts to the "Recovery Mode vs. Regular Mode" option. It also had a Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool to see if my Memory was working like it should. I did that and it did not find any problems with my memory. So, today is when I am completely unable to do anything with it. Before I was able to surf web and basically do anything that wasn't 3d. I could watch Youtube videos, but after a period of time, it would glitch up and either zoom in on a corner of the screen every second or have almost morphing pixels to where the guy in the video was moving.
So yeah. My gaming computer is basically down for the count for right now. It seems as if it progressively grew worse. Either that, or, I messed with it too much and killed it? Haha.
THANK YOU FOR READING!! Any new ground on this issue is great news to me. Sorry if I typed too much or if my pictures don't meet your quality standards!
Help is more than appreciated. Thanks again.
-Uklealey
