New graphics card, should I?

[Colonel C]

I've been noticing graphical glitches when I play games on my PC (Battlefield 2 demo, doom 3, CSS etc). Its a sort of snowy black and white dots that appear, I have a radeon 9800 pro, 3.2ghz P4, 1GB of ram. Anyway I think that that my graphics card may be damaged so I may get a new one (6600GT). 1. Whats causing this problem and 2. Should I get a new card to fix it?

I cleaned my PC recently with compressed air and it didn't fix the problem, I installed the latest catalyst drivers properly, so they're not conflicting with the old ones.

 

[nitromullet]

It does sound like your video card may be damaged. However, depending on whether or not you overclocked it or not, you might be able to get it replaced. If there wasn't anything that you did to it that would have caused the damage, I would look into your warrantee options before replacing it. The 6600GT is a nice card for the money, but not a big step up from the 9800 Pro.

 

[kurt454]

Your card definitely sounds damaged. What is your budget?

 

[Colonel C]

I don't really have a huge amount of money to play around with. I'm looking for more of a replacement rather than an upgrade. About ?230, the 6600GT, well this one in particular looks good: http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=307919&cks=SPK