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Ocassional graphics glitches on boot up.

Associate
Joined
26 May 2004
Posts
237
Location
Mansfield UK
Hi
I wonder if you could help me try to get to the bottom of this problem.

This has been happening for a few weeks now in one guise or another. When my son was playing 3d games such as MW2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 the monitor would sometimes just go blank and then the pc would restart.
Upon reboot there was no signal from the monitor (black screen) and eventually after a few restarts there would be lots of small coloured dots or 2 big coloured lines down the each side of the screen. I gave the pc a good clean inside with a compressed air can and pastry brush and made sure I gave the graphics card, cpu, and psu fans and extra good clean in case heat was the issue. It carried on happening but after updating the graphics driver I thought the problem had gone.

This morning when my wife turned the pc on (cold boot) the problem came back but this time it was straight from boot, even in the bios you could see the dots and lines. It took quite a few attempts to get into windows with sometimes the lines showing and other times just the dots. It seems to be working fine while its just left in windows but when I reboot it, it shows lines and dots and some of the letters in the bios screen are corrupt.

I have got an RMA for the graphics card but if it isnt that then i will be charged a testing fee etc and will be back to square 1 nearly (except I will know its not the card). I have no other pc to test the card on or the psu etc.

my specs are
Windows 7 64 Ultimate
NEC MultiSync 24WMGX3
Radeon 4870 X2 2048MB
i7 920 @ stock
Gigabyte EX58-UD5
OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Gold (3x2GB)
Coolermaster 1000W RealPower Modular PSU
Western Digital WD3000HLFS 300GB Hard Drive SATAII 10000rpm 16MB Cache
Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB
LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray Disc Re-Writer & HD DVD-Rom


thanks
steve
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2004
Posts
760
Location
Essex
Hi,

I have a similar issue with my 5850. It always is an issue from cold boot. What mine does is it gets to the windows log on screen and then the display just vanishes. If I go to the bios from a cold boot I get glitched lines and a sort of flickering effect, leave it for 5 mins or so and it is fine once the corruption has gone away.

I have tried a new motherboard, cleaning the slots up, changing PSU, running everything at stock (never OC'ed the 5850). I have been arguing the toss with OCUK for an RMA and they have taken almost a week to give me an RMA, the RMA itself is for a faulty card (fails under 3D load), which I am contesting as the GPU works fine once passed this initial problem. I am worried that they will look to fob me off saying it works under 3D load, which will be annoying because of the cost factor, but also as I have to deal with this issue every day. Not very pleased.

Cheers,

Blue
 
Associate
OP
Joined
26 May 2004
Posts
237
Location
Mansfield UK
Take a picture of the BIOS screen with the artifacts and RMA. The card is stuffed.

Well until any more suggestions come in I guess I will do that in the morning when I reboot it, but I still dont think I will get any joy from the RMA simlpy because they probably wont be able to replicate the problem at their end.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
26 May 2004
Posts
237
Location
Mansfield UK
here's some shots i took this morning, I tried 3 boots and then had to go into safe mode and let it warm up before it would get to a normal desktop.

DSCF4631.jpg


DSCF4630.jpg


DSCF4632.jpg


DSCF4635.jpg


DSCF4634.jpg
 
Associate
OP
Joined
26 May 2004
Posts
237
Location
Mansfield UK
i am sorry to say my problem has come back, I am so leaning towards trying towards trying a new psu for my system, what do people think is the lowest power and cheapest I can get away with on my system (must be modular)

Windows 7 64 Ultimate
NEC MultiSync 24WMGX3
Radeon 4870 X2 2048MB
i7 920 @ stock
Gigabyte EX58-UD5
OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Gold (3x2GB)
Coolermaster 1000W RealPower Modular PSU
Western Digital WD3000HLFS 300GB Hard Drive SATAII 10000rpm 16MB Cache
Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB
LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray Disc Re-Writer & HD DVD-Rom
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,190
Try pulling everything you dont need from the system ROM, extra HHD and alike, turn of everything not used in the BIOS, FDD, Firewire ect.

I would try the card in another rig if you can. A local PC shop should be able to help.
 
Associate
Joined
16 Feb 2010
Posts
2,053
Location
Malvern, England
4870 X2 cards get rather toasty I think its the end of your cards life.

The same happens with Nvidia 8800 cards which also get rather toasty after a few years they start artifacting, you could try the oven trick to try and sort the artifacting problem but it would be safer to RMA the card if it is still under warranty.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 Jun 2009
Posts
11,746
Location
Łódź, Poland
There is a bug called the cold bug, it's a bug with certain ATi cards where if it goes below a certain temp, it creates blank screens and random artifacts,
 
Caporegime
Joined
8 Nov 2008
Posts
28,997
^^Is that more to do with the 5*** series though? Particularly the 5970 and 5800s? Low idle clocks iirc, fussy to boot up but once gaming no problems at all.
 
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