Problems with 8800gt

[happy medium]

I bought a 8800gt with a Accelo cooler on it about 6 months ago on these forums.

I bought the rest of my system over the past months (all bought on the forums) and finally put it together.
These are my specs.
G31 m7-te motherboard and e5400 cpu. 100$ combo new on the forums
4 gigs ddr2 800 Crucial ram}
20x Pioneer burner } I got these 3 used for 75$
Hitachi 7200 drive }
Antec 1200 case. 100$ used
Enermax 535 watt case 34 amp combined rail. 25$ new Rma
And finally the 8800gt the part in question, for 55$ local pick up.

Total 350$

When I bought the card about 6 months ago I put it in my closet on the top shelve in a box and antistatic bag. So I finally got the money together to finish the system in the past 2 weeks. Already Ive had it overclocked to 3.4 stock voltage prime stable and started to install some games.

Heres the problem...
Counter strike source runs good @ max detail until you bump the resolution past 1024x768. I can run the stress test @ max detail no aa/af and it runs fine. Running the streess test at 1280x1024 4xaa/4xaf it starts to show purple artifacs but passes sometimes. Then I tried it at 1600x1200 and it trys to load but never makes it, it just hangs at load screen.
My score was over 200 fps. It plays online fine at 1024x800 med detail. haven't tried high details.

Left for dead will run ok at high detail for 30 seconds (sometimes a few min.) then crashes by showing artifacs and freezing with a looped audio.
At med detail and 800x600 res it will run fine but once you go above 800x600 it starts crashing. A few times it crashed my entire system to bios screen.

F.E.A.R. will run fine at 800x600 med video details anything higher it might run for a bit and crashes the same way Left for dead did.
I also did the video test here and it crashes when running anything over 800x600 but, it sometimes passes at 1024x800. Any aa/af at 1024x800 and it crashes faster.

I played Doom3 at max detail 1600x1200 and it didn't crash once?

Ran Fur mark bench @1600x1200 and it ran fine and never went over 45c.


I tried 5 different drivers.
Made sure direct x 9c was installed and was running with no problems.
Made sure my card and power connector was tight and seated properly.
Set my cpu at stock setting. no overclock.
Ran fur mark bench and it ran fine.
The accelo cooler has a 120 mm fan attached so its running real cool. 47c
My psu is more then enough!??
My windows xp was just installed 2 days ago.
I'm not having any other problems.
I've burnt and played movies, surfed the net, ect. ect. ect., just fine.

Any ideas guys? I'm thinking this guy sold me a bad card. Im thinking parts of the memory are bad on my card because it's not the detail settings of the game, but the resolution and aa/af thats crashing the system. I think thats mostly controlled by memory right?
Thanks..

 

[daveybrat]

Yup, sounds like the ram is going bad on the video card. That would explain it playing fine at lower resolutions most of the time but not at higher res. And the GPU is very cool, so ram has to be it.

 

[happy medium]

I grabbed a copy of 3d mark 2006 and ran it at defaults and scored 12,000.

Then I tried it at 1600x1200 with full aa/af and it still passed?
At 1600x1200 would'nt it stress my card enough to make it crash if the memory was going bad?

Mabe I'll download the crysis demo to know for sure.

Edit: I just played the Need for Speed Shift demo at 1280x1024 with 8xaa/8xaf all settings high. It played smooth as butter and between 35 and 50 fps. I tried to play at 1600x1200 but it automatically put me in window mode. Now this game should be crashing if it was my memory right?

 

[Dribble]

Underclock the gpu ram/core a bit, see if that fixes it.

 

[happy medium]

I just got finished playing the Crysis demo @1280x1024 all settings high and it ran fine.(30 fps+). I don,t think it's a hardware problem. Mabe I'll just reinstall FEAR and L4D and see what happens.