[calyps]

Just recently my PC has started crashing during gameplay. The screen would either go all ascii blocks in rainbow colors and hard crash, or it would go to brown/grey flat color, and hard crash.

So I took the graphics card back and exchanged for an identical one. Now my PC is still hard crashing, but differently. The ascii and brown screens are gone and now it's doing a weird artifact ridden glitchy thing when it hard crashes.

ex. taken with my phone https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22943334/crash1.JPG

Only happens during gameplay. Also, since replacing the card, the crash frequency seems to have ramped up.

Windows 8
i5-3570
EVGA GTX 660
32 gigs gskill ram (I do a lot of graphics and 3d modeling work)
msi h77ma-g43 mobo
SSD 120g HDD

Any ideas?

 

[T_Rex]

Hello, you left out the most important part of the equation - the power supply. It (or your memory) seems likely to be a suspect since apparently you have the same and even more of the same symptoms with a new video card. What power supply are you running?

 

[calyps]

It's a corsair TX650 if that helps.

Testing the ram right now, by trying one stick at a time. Granted all the ram could be bad, but considering the length of time since I built it, it seems more likely just one component is biting it.

Though it seems much like an overheating thing, as it happens after x number of minutes in game. And it still is happening after a reboot. But Give it a while and it will go back to normal, then play for a while and it gets gnarly again. It can even be avoided by alt-tabbing out of the game at the first sign of issue. But see, this is new as of the new graphics card, before it was just a sudden crash. Now it's some flickering, then artifacting, then hard crash. But HWMonitor is showing everything running well within safe ranges. ARG!

 

[calyps]

You know what, I think I'm a dummy.

I get a brand new card and my PC still crashes but in a very different way. Clearly, the new card is messed up, but in a different way. It just doesn't make sense if the card is fine that the crashing would change flavor between two identical fine cards.

Also, I just tested a really old card for an hour and it did fine (though ran like crap). Never crashed once.

 

[T_Rex]

What card was that you tested? perhaps it did not require much power? Theoretically your PSU should handle even a GTX670 or HD 7970 just fine, yet any PSU can be a dud, or marginal where rail stability is concerned.
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[calyps]

Okay, I just tried a different PSU. I am now pretty much certain it's the replacement card. The only reason I'm not 100% certain is because it's brand new and was supposed to fix the problem, but instead I just got new similar (but not the same) problems.

 

[Tyree]

Try the new GPU in another PC.