Flaxon

Last night as I was surfing the web, my power supply burned out. I got up early this morning, bought a replacement, as well as a long-overdue gig of ram. I swapped out the power supply, and I'm sure I did it right, and installed the RAM. I powered up the computer, and found that the monitor was displaying inch-thick, vertical, blue shaded lines. They don't obsure what they cover, but they give it a blue tint. This doesn't show up in the boot up or in the bios adjustments, only once I'm in windows. Various windows that I pull up and move also leave ghost outlines of the same nature.

I took out the old RAM, put it back in and took the new stuff out, installed the latest ATI drivers and the latest Omega drivers, and nothing helps! I checked the pins on my monitor cable, and they haven't been obviously damaged or have any missing.

I have no idea what is causing this. Any suggestions would be welcome! Thanks in advance.

Flax

forcifer

hmm. maby when you switched out the psu, the card was used to something else. or maby when the psu burned out, it burned part of the card. do you have an extra one somewhere?

Flaxon

Alright, I've been messing around a bit more, and I've come up with another symptom of whatever the problem is. Whenever I try to watch something with Media player, Winamp, RealAlt, or any other player, the video is very staticy, primarily on the lighter colors, and it follows a regular pattern, but I couldn't describe it. I tried taking a screen-shot of it, but it didn't work, so I'm afraid I can't be much help there.

And sadly, no, I don't have an extra vid card anywhere. Dammit, I hope it's not damaged. *sulk!*

forcifer

look at the settings. if it works now, it might not all be lost. do you have a temp reading for it? is the fan spinning?

Flaxon

The fan appears to be spinning just fine, and I'm not sure how to check temperature. Putting my hand in the general vicinity, though, it doesn't feel like it's radiating heat, but of course I'm not touching it to check while it's running. It was also doing this from frame 1 when I booted up my computer after about 15 hours of down time.

forcifer

hmm that is odd. could you take a pic of it? also, if you are using an lcd moniter, make sure that the hertz in settings is at the lowest. post back with what you see/do

Flaxon

Damn right it's odd, lol. Heres a screenshot of what I've got going.

http://photobucket.com/albums/f242/N...ent=Crappy.jpg

Hope it shows up right.

And my monitor is just a regular old CRT monitor, so thats not an issue.

forcifer

hmmm thats stange. is it lcd or crt? my last thing to help would be to change hertz in settings. you will have to ask someone who knows alot more about this then me. i dont think its fried, but there is always a chance

Flaxon

It's a CRT monitor. It's older, but I'm positive it's not going bad. Anyway, I tried every single one of the hertz settings and it didn't seem to help me.

Thanks for your help, even if we haven't solved anything, we still may have helped figure out what its not. :)

forcifer

i came up with another idea. restart, and go into bios. tell me what the volts are going into your card. it could be under powered for some odd reason

Fr4665

looks like somethings messed up with the pixel pipelines and its giving you specific vertical artifacts. looks like the card is fried... do you have an on board ? if so take the 9800 out and use the onboard and see if the lines are gone.

now for the psu part. did the psu burn out inside the PSU housing or do you see any other damage in cables on it ? there is a very big chance that the last second that PSU was working it shocked your card and damaged it permanently.

check the molex connectors on the card and see if there is anything black around the pins or if you can see any slight variation of "burned" stuff on the back of the card

good luck if you need help im me

Flaxon

I'm not seeing how to check the volts going into my card in my bios :-\. It's the standard ASUS smartBIOS utility that I see on every Asus board I've ever worked with. Unfortunately, I have to be getting to work, so I'm not going to be able to do anything more today.

Thanks a lot for your help guys, and I'll keep this thread updated as I go.

UncleMacro

From the looks of your screenshot, it looks like you have a video RAM problem. I'd try the video card in someone else's machine to see if the artifacts persist. If video RAM is your problem, then your only likely solution (without buying a new card) is underclocking the video RAM. You can try that with ATITool as explained here. Underclocking video RAM only works occasionally but it's easy enough to try. Just don't underclock the RAM too much or you'll get serious artifacts. 9800 Pros don't allow you to underclock your RAM very much. Step the clock rate down in small steps to be safe. ATITool also has an artifact checker which recognizes rendering problems. It should be able to tell if the underclocking is working.

forcifer

also, now that i think about it, google rivatuner and dl it. it will tell you a lot about the card and maby what is wrong

Fr4665

ATItool > rivatuner for ATI cards. but yeah its definatly something wrong with the clocks of the ram or either the gpu pixel pipelines