Hello there,
There's an old thread with a similar problem - not sure whether it should have been resurrected or not, so I'll just link it here: http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2286473
My situation is similar, however there are other circumstances that lead me to believe that I might not have to RMA.
TLDR:
Flickering in WoW with both a 1950xtx and a 4830 using any driver.
Major flickering and slowdown in Windows with the 4830 using ATI drivers, Win driver seems ok. Also limited to analog output with due to a bizarre digital output
PSU is only other variable. Motherboard, cpu, ram been running stable for years.
Tested ok and stable with Windows 7 previous to new PSU.
-
This is all on my old machine which is now my son's machine. It's an ASRock 939-dual sata with 2 gigs of corsair value ram (yes ddr1) and a single core athlon 4200. I had it running with a 1950xtx and it ran fine for years with XP, no problems except for the odd bit of driver fun when I tried Windows 7 on it.
When I set it up for my son with a new install of Win 7 32-bit, it started flickering at random in WoW. Didn't really try any other games with it, but I could hear the fan spinning up to full load when the flickering was happening and I figured the card was just on its last legs. I believe this was running drivers from Catalyst 9.1 or 9.2 ...it was the last update with the 1950 still supported for Win 7. Even bringing the settings to a minimum and cutting the resolution to 1152x864, the flickering was lessened but still there. And again, you could hear the card labouring.
If you're familiar with WoW, this wasn't Dalaran: City of Lag, this could be happening out in the middle of nowhere just as often as in a city or town.
I should have reverted back to the default Win7 driver to test but I didn't. I was pretty confident the card was simply dieing on me.
So I picked up a 4830 and now there's a similar problem with flickering when using ATI drivers but it's actually worsened. This time, it's in Windows as well as WoW. On top of that, when I set the monitor to DVD-D, I only get the windows background and nothing else. No icons, no taskbar, nothing. Just the background. When I go to DVI-A, it works like normal but with major flickering and slowdown.
Tried different ATI drivers, all do the same thing. I didn't even try to run WoW, the slowdown was that bad.
With the driver that Windows installs, Windows runs fine, but there's still the flickering in WoW.
So with the flickering on two cards, I'm wondering if maybe the motherboard has something astray with it. The PSU is the other thing, it's the only other component that's different after setting up the machine for my son. It's an older model Thermaltake 500W that's newly purchased; it has a dedicated PCI-E connection and sata connections - so reasonably modern just not one of the latest models. I'm thinking there might be something wrong with that or the motherboard has finally shown its last legs.
I'm going to try swapping out the PSU tonight and we'll see what that does.
I also have an old 7600gs AGP, I might try that in the board with nvidia drivers and see what happens. That doesn't rule out the motherboard completely though.
A new motherboard/cpu/ram would be the next step after that I guess...a rather expensive one though.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
There's an old thread with a similar problem - not sure whether it should have been resurrected or not, so I'll just link it here: http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=31&threadid=2286473
My situation is similar, however there are other circumstances that lead me to believe that I might not have to RMA.
TLDR:
Flickering in WoW with both a 1950xtx and a 4830 using any driver.
Major flickering and slowdown in Windows with the 4830 using ATI drivers, Win driver seems ok. Also limited to analog output with due to a bizarre digital output
PSU is only other variable. Motherboard, cpu, ram been running stable for years.
Tested ok and stable with Windows 7 previous to new PSU.
-
This is all on my old machine which is now my son's machine. It's an ASRock 939-dual sata with 2 gigs of corsair value ram (yes ddr1) and a single core athlon 4200. I had it running with a 1950xtx and it ran fine for years with XP, no problems except for the odd bit of driver fun when I tried Windows 7 on it.
When I set it up for my son with a new install of Win 7 32-bit, it started flickering at random in WoW. Didn't really try any other games with it, but I could hear the fan spinning up to full load when the flickering was happening and I figured the card was just on its last legs. I believe this was running drivers from Catalyst 9.1 or 9.2 ...it was the last update with the 1950 still supported for Win 7. Even bringing the settings to a minimum and cutting the resolution to 1152x864, the flickering was lessened but still there. And again, you could hear the card labouring.
If you're familiar with WoW, this wasn't Dalaran: City of Lag, this could be happening out in the middle of nowhere just as often as in a city or town.
I should have reverted back to the default Win7 driver to test but I didn't. I was pretty confident the card was simply dieing on me.
So I picked up a 4830 and now there's a similar problem with flickering when using ATI drivers but it's actually worsened. This time, it's in Windows as well as WoW. On top of that, when I set the monitor to DVD-D, I only get the windows background and nothing else. No icons, no taskbar, nothing. Just the background. When I go to DVI-A, it works like normal but with major flickering and slowdown.
Tried different ATI drivers, all do the same thing. I didn't even try to run WoW, the slowdown was that bad.
With the driver that Windows installs, Windows runs fine, but there's still the flickering in WoW.
So with the flickering on two cards, I'm wondering if maybe the motherboard has something astray with it. The PSU is the other thing, it's the only other component that's different after setting up the machine for my son. It's an older model Thermaltake 500W that's newly purchased; it has a dedicated PCI-E connection and sata connections - so reasonably modern just not one of the latest models. I'm thinking there might be something wrong with that or the motherboard has finally shown its last legs.
I'm going to try swapping out the PSU tonight and we'll see what that does.
I also have an old 7600gs AGP, I might try that in the board with nvidia drivers and see what happens. That doesn't rule out the motherboard completely though.
A new motherboard/cpu/ram would be the next step after that I guess...a rather expensive one though.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
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