Can a dying hard drive cause artifacts in games?

[kypron7]

My friends computer has been acting really strange lately. It first became slow in windows when copying files or installing programs, and just recently started displaying artifacts in almost all games. I thought his ram might be bad, so I got him to run memtest86+, he said it ran for 11 hours, no errors, but immediately upon rebooting windows reported errors and corrupted sectors on disc, and now does this every time he reboots. Now, I am thinking his hard drive is going bad, but would that cause graphical glitches as well? I unfortunately don't have a spare hard drive yet to test, I will be doing so next week.

His specs are: Athlon64 3500+
MSI K8n-neo4-f mobo
2x 1gb kingston value ddr400
BFG Geforce 7900 GT OC
Enermax 535 w
Windows XP
Western Digital SATA1 250 GB 8 mb cache

The steps I have taken so far are:
1)Reinstalled all motherboard and video drivers
2)Checked all temperatures (cpu 35c, gpu 55c)
3)Underclocked video card a small amount to see if artifacts disappeared
4)New power supply a few months ago
5)Memtest86+ as stated above
6)Tried switching SATA cables and port

I have NOT had a chance yet to use a hard drive diagnostic program.

 

[elmer92413]

Ya, I'd say it's the hdd. Although I don't know specifically if a bad hdd can cause artifacts in game, but I'd imagine that if the gpu can't grap the texture files or gets corrupted ones it would cause artifacts.

 

[shortylickens]

Originally posted by: elmer92413
Ya, I'd say it's the hdd. Although I don't know specifically if a bad hdd can cause artifacts in game, but I'd imagine that if the gpu can't grap the texture files or gets corrupted ones it would cause artifacts.

If a drive is damaged I'd say its more likely it wont load the game at all. I find it difficult to believe the drive would improperly load the exact same files the exact same way each and every time a game is run.
However, if Windows is telling you a disk is corrupted thats a problem which needs to be addressed anyway.
Fix that, install the game on a fresh (or known to be good) drive and tell us what happens.

Which game and exactly what kind of glitches? What drivers?
Can your run a 3D video test in addition to the memtest?
When I had a dying Radeon X800 Pro I ran 3DMark05 on continuous loop (max details and res, I got crummy frame rates but thats how I knew I was stressing my system). After a little while the program would crash and one time the whole system froze up.

 

[kypron7]

Hopefully next monday i will pick up a hard drive for my friend, and do a fresh install of windows. Shortylickens, he gets artifacts in Two Worlds, and Oblivion. There are lines coming out at odd angles from character models, and sometimes everything goes either red or black. He told me that these games also crash occasionally, and the computer has rebooted by itself when playing a game too. I will try 3dmark, and see what goes on with that. He has the newest drivers from nividia.com for video, and the newest MSI drivers from their website for the chipset, lan, and sound.

The artifacts are never identical, so is it possible that if its like elmer92413 says, and texture files are corrupted from the bad hard drive, that graphics can be screwey? I'm just really hoping we can just replace the hard drive, and not a video card as well.

 

[OdiN]

artifacts in games are most often caused by bad or overclocked system or graphics RAM. More so than anything else.