Need help with gfx card - video pros, please.

[Tempered81]

Im not sure if this is a driver issue or what. im using a radeon 9800 pro 128mb with some catalyst drivers which are fairly new. i have no problems play older opengl and d3d games, but the newer ones and the benchmarks in 3dmark05 have crazy lighting problems when certain lights are displayed. it happens bad in fear, doom3, quake4 and futurmarks 3dmark05. surrounding some lights i have red and green dots on the screen near the lights only. they seem to go away some if i underclock the videocard from its stock speeds. the problems i think it may be are as follows:

1. crappy PSU 550 watt generic i payed like 20 bucks for. probably this.

2. older radeon 9800 pro in new system thats maybe just dying on me.

3. overclocked fsb and agp voltage and pcie voltage on my e4300 core2duo

4. crappy cheapo motherboard: supporting agp and pci-e: asrock 775dual-vsta

5. bad driver installation of video card drivers

6. bad direct x instalation (doesnt do it in older opengl)

so i am trying to remedy the solution. maybe its a combination of everything. if anyone thinks it may be one of the six here or if anyone has a different idea as to what is going wrong, please let me know.
I will be following this up with a screenshot of my problems



I really need some help!

thanks,
jared

 

[daveybrat]

Sounds more like the card is going bad to me. If it works better when 'underclocking' it, then it's probably overheating and i know the 9800 series did run pretty hot. Probably time to look toward a new PCI-e card as your new motherboard supports it.

 

[swtethan]

Yeah it looks like your card is dieing.

 

[Killrose]

Make sure the card is clean and free of dust and that the fan spins good. If problems are going away in all apps when underclocking the card to non-pro speeds 280core/270mem or so, then maybe you have a non-pro that someone has bios flashed to a pro.

Does the sticker on the card say 9800pro or just 9800?

 

[Tempered81]

WOW! thank you so much for the suggestions i did what killrose said and cleaned the fan and heatsink made sure it was free from dust. put a little denatured alcohol to work on the dust clogs, vacummed it and even reset it with some artic silver 5. now i can actually overclock my card and no errors!!!!!

 

[Tempered81]

never thought dust made such an impact! lol