Artifacts in startup screen + other weird things

[sulanebouxi]

Hey everyone, I've been having some weird graphics glitches and some strange crashes with programs(World of Warcraft especially)

Here's my setup:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Asus A8N-E Mobo
500W Seasonic S12 PSU
2GB OCZ memory
ATI X1900XT video card
SB Audigy ZS2

This problem first cropped up when I finally got some new parts installed that I RMA'ed. The motherboard and processor are fresh from the factory. The thing is, The artifacts would show up on startup and in BIOS which made me think that something was wrong with the video card. I went to restart the computer(by powering down and powering back on, reset didn't fix it) and the artifacts went away. I can't seem to figure out what's wrong.

The next problem gets weirder. I'm playing WoW and after a few minutes of playing, either the characters stop in their tracks(usually a net connection issue but internet worked fine) or it produces a #132 error saying that there's a problem with the memory and that it couldn't read it.

So, I ran memtest for 6 and a half hours...for I think 5 passes, and no errors whatsoever. Could this be a motherboard problem? I've pretty much run out of ideas short of flashing the BIOS(that makes me nervous).

So, I try another game. I load TF2 and aside from some audio skipping when finding servers(also odd) I hop on a game and nothing bad happens. No restarts or crashes.

I'm out of ideas...I've never flashed my bios before. So I'm reading up on how to do it correctly.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[amdhunter]

I think the video corruption in the bios on startup is classic sign of bad video memory. Can you try underclocking the card and testing it that way for a few hours?

 

[sulanebouxi]

Thanks amdhunter for the reply 🙂. I've downclocked the gpu core by about 25 mhz and everything seems to be stable so far in WoW. No crashes either. But I also uninstalled the Nvidia firewall that came with my mobo software package. That's been screwing with a lot of things too. Beforehand I couldn't open some exe's cause that firewall would do something to the download and cause them to become corrupted. It seems to also have been the reason WoW was crashing(at least I think so). I haven't tested the startup artifacts yet...I'll get to that in a bit.

Thanks for the help!