mattdabbs

Hi everyone, quick question about a weird problem I'm having.

Recently, when playing some games, especially company of heroes, I've been getting alot of graphical flickering and polygons extending themselves into lines off the screen. It doesn't always happen right away: sometimes it takes 5-10 minutes but sometimes it happens as soon as I start up the game. I thought at first that my graphics card was going bad, so I swapped it out with another one, but it was having the same issues. ATI Tools has the GPU temp idling at the upper 40's C and under load with Company of Heroes, it jumps to around 66C. I thought that was kind of high, but I've been reading online that for my graphics card that 60-65 was a normal temp under load. And in any case, with one game it actually runs all the way up to 80C but its the only game I have no graphical problems with. (Heroes V)

I've swapped out the system memory and the power supply to make sure it wasn't either of those and I still have the problem. Could it possibly be the processor itself overheating? Speedfan is saying that I'm running at around 45C on each core idle and around 65C under load. Or could it be a virus on the system? Probably unlikely, but at this point I'm stumped.

System Specs

Pentium Core Duo 2.4ghz
ATI X1900gt 256mg
2GB RAM

Powersupply
3.3V/+5V/+12V1/+12V2/+5Vsb/-12V
22A/21A/18A/16A/2A/.3A

The other powersupply I tried:
3.3/5/12V1/12V2/-5V/-12V/5Vsb
20A/20A/16A/16A/.8A/.8A/2.0A

The problem didn't start occurring until about two months ago and slowly built up to be worse and worse. The system was running fine before that and I have identical machines that are running fine as well.

Thanx for your help guys.

ebackhus

What you are seeing is called "artifacting." This is commonly caused by overheating of the video chip. The temperature of your CPU is a bit high for a Core 2 series so I wonder if enough cool air is entering the system.

IAmNutsAboutPCs

What is the name of the PSU's you used?

mattdabbs

I don't remember what I have in there now, but the one I changed out with was a Cooler Master or something similar.

As for the cool air, nothing at all has changed since it was working except it's gotten a little colder outside. The fans are all clean and spinning fine.

dai

when you swap the psu to check you need a quality higher wattage than the one that is in
you would expect to see a quality 550w min in there
being as another card had the same results i would suspect the power
redo the paste on the cpu with some arctic silver
http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_s...structions.htm

mattdabbs

The thing with the PSU is that none of my other computers that are identical (I run an internet cafe) are having any problems. Could running to low of wattage have damaged that motherboard or processor?

dai

if the psu went it could have taken something with it