i5/LGA1156/P55/GTX280 system freezing with graphical artifacts

[Ichinisan]

Very few 1156 mini-ITX boards on eBay...so expensive If it turns out that my nephew's motherboard is bad, we'll want to get a mini-ITX board and move components into a mini-ITX chassis. I'd consider switching to an SSD, but his Steam library might be hard to manage if we have to install a second drive for the game installs. Regardless, it would need a faster HDD than the horrendous WD 2TB GreenPower it currently has as a boot drive.

My nephew is far out-of-state. He's nowhere near a Best Buy or any place that sells computer components. I think it's going to be difficult to determine which component in his system is bad. It's a first-gen i5 we built right when i5/LGA1156/P55 debuted many years ago.

It keeps freezing with screens like these:

Zoomed-in, it looks like Space Invaders meets Centipede.

Happens more often when he's trying to play a game, but not exclusively in games. He's fairly sure it's not the monitor (I think he said he stops hearing anything from his headphones when it freezes this way).

• Intel Core i5 first gen (not sure of the exact SKU, but it was probably the lowest one)
• Some kind of Gigabyte board (P55 chipset if I recall correctly).
• I don't recall how much RAM we installed. 4GB or 8GB.
• EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
• WD 2TB GreenPower HDD (slooow!!!)
• Win7 64-bit

I vaguely recall that the earliest LGA1156 boards had a defective CPU socket design that would usually manifest when overclocking. Would that cause a screen like he's seeing?

Title edited to be a little more descriptive.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator

 

[Burpo]

That looks like memory issues with the GeForce GTX 280. Check for updated drivers, but that card's getting pretty old. I've seen similar screens from memory going bad on some video cards. Replacing the card fixed the problem.

 

[Ichinisan]

That looks like memory issues with the GeForce GTX 280. Check for updated drivers, but that card's getting pretty old. I've seen similar screens from memory going bad on some video cards. Replacing the card fixed the problem.

Yeah. I've planned to ship an even older 9800GT EE ("energy efficient") to test with.

 

[vailr]

Did he check that the GPU fan is actually spinning?

 

[Ichinisan]

Did he check that the GPU fan is actually spinning?

Yeah. Cleaned out the GPU HSF too.

 

[mfenn]

With graphical artifacts like this, I would agree that you're probably looking at a GPU problem.

Also, I edited your title to be more descriptive. Right now it looks like your first sentence ended up in the title.

 

[CZroe]

With graphical artifacts like this, I would agree that you're probably looking at a GPU problem.

Also, I edited your title to be more descriptive. Right now it looks like your first sentence ended up in the title.

I think he knows that and is taking steps to confirm it but is looking for an mITX motherboard recommendation in case that doesn't work out. That's why the title was about motherboards. There was a well-known issue with early Foxconn H1 / Socket H parts for LGA 1156 CPUs where certain pins would just burn out (especially when O/Cing).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2859

He got the earliest and cheapest combination so I would not be surprised if that were related. Sure, it isn't an extreme O/C, but I've always thought it could be a problem in the future, since the article demonstrates that it can be a matter of degrees.