Possible overheating issue or defective card?

[livngston]

Hi all. I just purchased a brand new Dell XPS8300 with a Intel i7 (2nd Gen) 3.4Ghz and 16GB RAM. I swapped out the base video card for a new Powercolor HD 6850 (and updated to latest drivers from AMD's website). During normal use at 1920x1200 resolution it appears to work fine.

Then I loaded up Skyrim. The game recommended the high graphic setting. However even when playing for more than 2 minutes, the display starts to develop artifacts and tears the screen (the display shifts a third to the right and then wraps around to the left side of the screen). At this point even if I exit to the desktop the display remains all messed up.

I have to do a hard reboot to correct the display.

On my old Intel Core Duo 3 Ghz with an older nVidia 9600GT, I was able to play Skyrim for hours on medium to high graphics with no issues.

Is this an issue of the video card overheating? I hear the fan kick in when Skyrim loads. Is this a defective video card? Should I exchange for a different brand 6850 like Saphire? Is the equivalent nVidia a better card?

 

[SolMiester]

I guess being a DELL OEM build, I would check PSU is up to the task!, then check the card!

 

[Doougin]

after a little googling it seems it only has a 460 watt PSU. Thatd be way below my comfort zone for a power supply with those components. Ima say thats the problem. but you should check if it is the 460 watt or not. I dont deal with OEM computers for this reason.

 

[livngston]

It is the 460W supply. But plenty of posts from Google searches of people that ran the HD 6850 with no issues on the 460W supply.

 

[superjim]

Does this happen with all games or just Skyrim? Keep in mind that Skyrim is largely CPU bound, so it "could" be your i7 overheating (highly doubt it since it should shutdown your entire computer at a certain temp). Download GPU-Z and leave it running in the background, logging temps. As long as your GPU temp stays lower than 90C you can mostly rule out the video card.

 

[God Mode]

Any kind of game artifacting would lead me to suspect the gpu first.

IME, a lacking psu doesn't cause artifacts instead force closes to desktop or shuts off the pc due to the PSU protection kicking in.

 

[livngston]

I ran GPU-Z and ran Skyrim for a couple of minutes. It did not get to the point where it crashed, but it maxed out around 80 degrees celsius (sensor #2 in GPU-Z maxed out around 143.5 Celsius) - which I am guessing is the problem. Is this merely a ventilation problem (and if so I am wondering how so many other people got their XPS 8300s which have a cramped case to properly run with this card) or is this card running too hot?

Even when I removed the side of the tower to allow full ventilation, it still ran up to 82 degrees celsius on the last run...

 

[Tweak155]

Can you try the following?

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2226255