Artifacts on desktop after updating BIOS

[imported_isaac]

Hey everyone, new guy here! Hope you guys are having the happiest of holidays so far. Mine are doing fine outside of this annoying problem I'm having, and it's a bit of a long story, so thanks to whoever bears with me on this one :

Was trying to play Half-Life 2 with my 9700 Pro and it was just unbearably slow. When I went to look at my settings I noticed that AGP acceleration was off, but when I tried to move the slider to the right and restart the system it'd drop back down to "None." Figured something was up with my BIOS (Asus P4C800-E motherboard) so I went ahead and updated it to the latest version I could find, but still no AGP acceleration. Soo, after some searching, I went to the Intel site and downloaded a BIOS update through there for the 875 chipset, and viola! AGP acceleration lives! Unfortunately I didn't notice any performance gain in any of my games, and after about a week I began getting artifacts on my 2D display.

After text, there would be tiny graphical blocks trailing the text along with a few lines running up and down the screen. Tried updating my drivers, but to no avail. Figured it could be power, but I didn't think my 420W power supply would be having any problems at all, and after giving one cable to the videocard, there were still problems. Thought it was cooling, and did what I could, but nothing worked. So, I figured my videocard was in trouble and went ahead and RMAed it.

Figured I was forced to buy a new videocard, so I reluctantly picked up a BFG 6800nu OC and guess what? Same problems. Checked Asus again and found that there was a newer version than the one I had updated with previously so I went ahead and flashed the BIOS yet again and updated it. Still no luck.

I've pretty much just run out of options and I'm not entirely sure what to do. The worst part is that I'm getting worse framerates than with my 9700Pro and I've already made sure to run Driver Cleaner in Safe Mode several times and this entire ordeal is quite a nuisance. I'm not incredibly great at computers, so I'm pretty positive I've done something wrong or I've missed something, but any help is incredibly appreciated. Again, thanks beforehand!

 

[imported_isaac]

Small little bump! Hope it's not too soon, since it got backed up a couple of pages.

 

[Fardringle]

It may be unrelated, but I had almost exactly the same problem when I plugged in a new (used but new to me) Ti4200 into my old Althlon 1.4 GHz system on an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I got really bad artifacts in 2D and 3D and then the system would crash. I stuck the card in another, newer computer and it works flawlessly. I then tried the ATI 9600Pro 8X AGP card from that other computer in my 1.4Ghz system and it had exactly the same problem again. (seeing a trend here? ) I don't know anything about your motherboard, but after doing some researching it looks like my motherboard simply will not work with 8X/1.5 volt AGP cards, even if I set AGP to 1X in the BIOS, and since you are having almost exactly the same problem it might be the case with yours as well.