Svartmetall
Great Unclean One
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
- Messages
- 2,467
For a week or two now, after a few hours of gaming, I've noticed this bug where the display (usually after alt-tabbing out to something then back into game) starts flickering and filling with weird polygons etc then locks up....what has worked up till now is to close down the game client then just log back in, which worked OK. I'd figured since it happened after a few hours' gaming the video cache was filling up, and it wouldn't be a heat issue since I was able to open the game client back up again immediately and carry on as if nothing had happened. Only happened when gaming, PC would run for ever with no issues otherwise.
Today it happened again; I closed the client and opened it back up, and the display corruption was still there. Rebooted, same. Then it started appearing on the desktop, strange patterns of little multi-coloured squares all over the screen and a few odd polygons as well, and after a minute or two while this gets worse the display goes blank and my monitor goes into power saving - the PC stays powered up though. I'm currently having to run in VGA mode to be able to do anything at all. I figure it's not CPU since that would do it in VGA mode on desktop as well if it had issues; the fact that the machine stays powered up while my monitor goes into power save makes me think the card's just stopped outputting anything at all. I tried dxdiag and it was running the early tests - concentric rectangles, bouncing ball etc - even while there was distortion on-screen then it went blank again.
The card is an AGP GeForce 4 Ti4600; if it has died, I guess I've had 4 1/2 years of good service out of it, but I need my gaming fix goddamit! Plus running a 20" widescreen TFT in VGA mode is, well, sucky.
My instinct tells me the GFX card is screwed, but I'd welcome any other input. Obviously it's hard to do much on the PC in VGA mode, and hard to test in normal mode since I can't keep a display on-screen for more than about 2-3 minutes before the display corruption starts creeping in and I know it'll go blank any second. I took the side off the case, and the fan on the card still looks to be working OK.
Today it happened again; I closed the client and opened it back up, and the display corruption was still there. Rebooted, same. Then it started appearing on the desktop, strange patterns of little multi-coloured squares all over the screen and a few odd polygons as well, and after a minute or two while this gets worse the display goes blank and my monitor goes into power saving - the PC stays powered up though. I'm currently having to run in VGA mode to be able to do anything at all. I figure it's not CPU since that would do it in VGA mode on desktop as well if it had issues; the fact that the machine stays powered up while my monitor goes into power save makes me think the card's just stopped outputting anything at all. I tried dxdiag and it was running the early tests - concentric rectangles, bouncing ball etc - even while there was distortion on-screen then it went blank again.
The card is an AGP GeForce 4 Ti4600; if it has died, I guess I've had 4 1/2 years of good service out of it, but I need my gaming fix goddamit! Plus running a 20" widescreen TFT in VGA mode is, well, sucky.
My instinct tells me the GFX card is screwed, but I'd welcome any other input. Obviously it's hard to do much on the PC in VGA mode, and hard to test in normal mode since I can't keep a display on-screen for more than about 2-3 minutes before the display corruption starts creeping in and I know it'll go blank any second. I took the side off the case, and the fan on the card still looks to be working OK.