Bizzare Problem w/ GeForce 6600 GT & Dell 2005FPW

[Wizeguy81]

Hi All,

I've had the Dell 2005FPW for a month now, and it generally worked fine, except that in CS:S there's been some major texture tearing, leaving lots of flickering green polygons all over the screen. I never happened with my old CRT and the same video card.

Anyway, a more serious problem appeared out of the blue: First CS:S crashed on me (I was overclocking the card, but only a little , and now ANY game using direct3D displays lots of tiny squares on the screen. They don't take up much of the screen, but there's lots of them in a pattern. It looks as though each square is "cut out" of a different part of the screen. As I start to play, more squares show up until it becomes unplayable.

I tooled around with all the in-game graphics adjustments, all the NVIDIA settings, and even removed/reseated my video card. I'm afraid it's a hardware problem.

Any ideas? I built the computer myself, and I have all the latest drivers. Any help would be much appreciated!

WinXP SP2
Athlon 64 3200+ (2.12GHz)
Gigabyte NForce4 (basic)
1GB RAM
Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT

 

[FlyingPenguin]

This is nothing to do with the monitor. It's an issue with the card. Either it's overheating, you're overclocking too hard, your drivers need to be re-installed (use the lastest OFFICIAL NVidia drivers, not any of the hacked drivers), or some of the RAM on the card is failing.

Make sure the GPU fan is running full speed and not rattling or surging.

Try taking the cover off the computer (which should lower the temps) and see if it behaves. If so, it's definately a heat issue.

Hope this helps...

 

[Wizeguy81]

Thanks. I knew it wasn't a problem with the monitor directly (although I did have problems with the digital input). Before I posted here I reinstalled the drivers, set everything to defaults, and I watched the GPU temp, and the fan is fine. Practice safe overclocking... and I'm not even overclocking anymore.

I have a bad feeling something in the card just... blew out. It actually reminds me of a problem I had with an older card, where the capacitors were actually bad in that entire line of boards, causing games to have all kinds of distortion. If that's the case, I'm ticked off. The warranty on these parts isn't nearly what it should be for DIY'ers

 

[gotekix]

I had a similar problem many years ago with an amd k6 and a really old nvidia card (dont remmeber which). I'd be playing counter strike and all of a sudden these little squares would start to plague the textures like a virus. I called it "lego" cuz it pretty much looked like a bunch of lego blocks on the screen. I could never fix the problem until i switched out the video card. It could possibly be from damage while overclocking. new drivers "may" fix it but I doubt it's software related if you didn't change the drivers and it suddenly just happened after you were overclocking. By the why, I'm using the leadtek 6600gt and a dell 2005fpw and everything is great (71.89 drivers).