Computer Display Worries

Aegis

About an hour or so ago I logged off of WoW to head up to supper, and everything seemed to be working fine. Came back down later, restarted the client, and was greeted to my character showing off an impressive array of hundreds of multi-coloured shifting lines and planes bisecting him, totally obscuring anything in the landscape, which made me cringe and inwardly think of my video card. Exiting the program, I was then greeted with my mouse cursor having a row above and below of tiny spaced lines (as if it were encased in a box) and the tops and bottoms of window bars having similar flickering lines and boxes running through them.

Restarting the computer thinking it was just a temporary glitch solved nothing, in fact on the windows and dell loading screens, there were also bluish rows of evenly spaced boxes going up and down the screen. I then reinstalled my display drivers, which also solved nothing, followed by letting my computer stay turned off for several minutes before restarting. That made the weird graphic boxes go away on loading, but after a minute or so the glitches around my mouse pointer returned. As well, WoW now greets me with this handy error when I try and load it:

"World of Warcraft was unable to start 3D acceleration. Please make sure DirectX 9.0c is installed and your video drivers are up to date."

Since my drivers are up to date (WoW was working not that long ago) and I do have DirectX 9.0c I ran the DirectX diagnostics, and it didn't seem to say anything was wrong. So, is my video card starting to die on me, or did something wonky happen with my 3D acceleration? Any help in regards to fixing this would be appreciated. Thanks.

I'm running:

Pentium 4, 3.00 GHz
1 GB RAM
Radeon 9800 PRO Graphics Card (Omega 3.8.291 Display Drivers)

Edit: I'm also noticing as I scroll up and down the forums here at PA, that it seems to be extremely sluggish in the actually scrolling, as if its having to work to refresh the page and show me the new position, as I can clearly see a line (and the top of the new page position) quickly moving from the bottom to top of browser.

Salvation122

Might be a heat problem.

AtomBomb

Check your video card fan.

Aegis

AtomBomb wrote: »

Check your video card fan.

What would I be looking for? I don't do much hardware-related things with my computer beyond occasionally installing RAM, so I have no idea what it would look like.

IreneDAdler

It sounds like your video card is dying on you. If you don't have a way of diagnosing the problem or solving it, I would just get a new video card. The same thing happened to me about a month ago; I got Dell to replace my videocard and everything's hunky-dory now.

soupeh

Sounds as though your video card is over-heating. Have a look at the fan on the card to make sure it's spinning.

What would I be looking for?

There should be several fans inside your PC.. on the case itself for air intake/exhaust, on the CPU sitting on a large heatsink, maybe one on the motherboard chipset, and one on your video card.



Also check that the fins of the heatsink are not clogged up with dust.

AtomBomb

Your video card probably looks like this:



You want to first check that the fan is spinning. You also want to make sure that it's not spinning slowly. This is a bit harder to determine if you don't know what it looks like when it's working properly. If it's going slow, it might look like it's wobbling.

Check the heatsink (the silver thing that the fan is surronded by) for dust. If the fins of the heatsink get clogged with muck it can make your card overheat.

You may also be able to determine if the card is overheating via software, but I don't think that card has a temperature sensor.

Hope that helps a bit. If it is just the fan it's not a difficult fix.

Aegis

Fan on video card looks like its spinning, but the interior of the computer itself is covered with dust completely. Gonna look at cleaning that out first and see if that doesn't make a difference. What'd be best way to clean out the dust without damaging any components inside?

IreneDAdler

Probably canned compressed air. Or maybe a teeny vacuum.

Aegis

Cleaned out the interior the best I could, and while some of the graphical anomalies have lessened, I'm still getting sluggishness and anything that is requiring 3D acceleration either crashes to desktop or gives me an error. Any suggestions on afforable replacement graphics cards? Would they be simple enough to install myself like plugging in new RAM is, or would I be better served having a place install it for me?

Orestes

Installing a new card is pretty simple, eject the old one, plug in the new one (plug in fan if it has a separate power source) If your video card is fried then it's fried, nothing you can do. If you're using a 9800, I'm assuming it's an AGP, therefore you're stuck with generation yesterdays models (with a couple of exceptions). I would suggest getting another 9800, they were pretty much the cream of the crop before PCI-E rolled in. You might have a problem finding them because they are a couple years old, but if you're looking for an "affordable" replacement, it's pretty much the best bet you got.

If you're Canadian look at NCIX Or TigerDirect

If you're apart of the United States, try Newegg

Keep in mind, if you drop by your futureshop, bestbuy, or whatever, they might have an old one in stock still, and they pricematch, online is usually much cheaper.

Aegis

Yup, dxdiag tells me its an AGP chipset, so I'll see what futureshop has in stock there. Thanks for the help.

Orestes

Like I said, 9800 were about the only decent/cheap/actually good, AGP card, aside from all the
"LOOK AT US, WE'RE BRAND NEW PCI-E'S THAT ARE ON ALL RELEASE PLATFORMS, BUT IF YOU BUY IT ON THE NEW ONE YOU GET IT FOR A LOT OF MONEIES OFF" cards, perhaps the Nvidea 6600GT or something. AGP are pretty cheap, and like I said, make sure you're price matching, Internet is SO much cheaper then local.

Also, run some benchmarks to be assured that you're card is totally fried, and you're not wasting your money on some new card. It might be a driver issue (doubtfull) I would go and reconfigure your drivers. If it really does turn out to be a fried GPU, well then..... that sucks.

Aegis

Popped into Futureshop and while they didn't have any 9800s left, I did notice an X1650 (this one though for about $50 cheaper than what that site's offering). The guy did ask about the power supply and I had no idea, and am having trouble finding the specs for it. Where would I look to see about that?

Would a card like that work as a replacement (ie- would it fit and work in my computer), as I notice it is an AGP card and I meet the specs otherwise on my comp for it (assuming of course my power supply is adequate for it)? I have one more place to check to see if they have 9800s in stock if not.

Aegis

Okay, so, few hours ago I decided before comitting to getting a new graphics card tomorrow to try and see if doing a system restore to the day before this problem happened would have any effect at all, and amazingly, I could load the client and get ingame. The graphical glitches were still apparent, though they were not as severe as the initial time it happened, and I could at least play, which was a marked improvement. So, thinking this some sort of weird driver corruption I tried one last time (this time completely uninstalling the omega drivers to the point Windows Hardware was redetecting my "new" video controllers and asking to install their drivers as if for the first time) to reinstall to the most current version of Omega. When I did that and restarted like it prompted, I got the error about 3D again and I was back to square one. Giving up and trying system restore back to the same settings that seemed to work, I am now noting that the computer loads to the Windows XP loading screen, pauses, goes black then I hear an audible "click" noise from somewhere inside my case causing the computer to restart at the dell loading screen and greet me with a "We're sorry, windows did not start correctly..." message.

Last Known Good Configuration nor Start Windows Normally seems to work, it just restarts to the same error message with the same audible click each time, but Safe Mode does get me in.

I did recheck the interior and the graphics card fan -is- running normally from what I can tell; its spinning and I see nothing wobbling or being out of place. So, stumped at this point.