Graphics Did I get a defective X700?

I'm putting together mostly new parts into a system and I got a new case, Antec 480ps, MSI 925XE Neo board, P4 3.0ghz, 2gb (2- 1gb Corsair), and carried over an 80GB IDE HD and IDE CDRW from my old system. The problem part is a new Abit Radeon X700 PCI Express 128mb GDDR3 video card. In windows XP (fully patched) it works fine. In all the apps I've tried it with (photoshop, digital pro (image mangement), office stuff, etc.) it works fine. I download the Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 demo (I like the older ones and my older system couldn't handle 3) and when I installed it I got good news. My system can run at the high level of video/detail with no problem. It had problems (see below). I also have a CD with a demo version of Chronicles of Riddick so I gave this a shot and had similar problems.

THe problem is that these games are displaying all sorts of black triangles or squares on the screen. Sometimes two large black triangles but usually hundreds of squares. I have the latest ROMs on the motherboard and downloaded the latest (5.6) AVI drivers. Still no good. If you don't mind a 12mb download (each) I was able to capture 3 short movies of what I'm seeing on screen.

Chronicles

RCT A

RCT B

Notice in RCT that windows, dialog boxes, etc are fine however the loading message and game itself are trashed. Similar display in Chronicles.

So, any ideas? Defective video card? Even though it works in XP just fine?

System isn't over heating as I get this 100% of the time, even right after turning it on, and I have the side of the case open just to make sure it's cool enough. System is reporting CPU temp in the low 40's. The main purpose of this system isn't game playing but I do like to relax once in a while with one and this is just frustrating!



Thanks in advance for any recomendations or ideas.

-G

 

Looks like bad graphics memory to me. I would say it's RMA time .

Could be a driver thing (it almost looks like one of the ways CrossFire is supposed to be implimented ), have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling drivers? Are you using the latest Catalysts?

 

I noticted the same rare little flickers on my 9800xt, what kind of temps are you getting on the Gpu?
frank
...

 

Thanks for the replies.

I do have the latest drivers although I just updated the 4.6 that came with it to 5.6. I didn't remove and reinstall. I can give this a shot.

I don't know what the GPU temp is... any suggestions on how to find this out? Looking in the ATI control panel didn't yield this value. Interestingly enough, in the Catalyst Control Center there is an area with a car driving down a road and you can change parameters to see how this will affect your view. The small window area where the car is also has the flickering, squares, triangles and a few lines too. And I can turn the machine on, go straight to a game and still see this problem... if it was heat, would it have gotten that hot that quickly? The heatsink and fan on the card appear to be working fine. Heat sink is warm but not hot and fan is spinning.

Time to look for a replacement I guess.

-G

 

In case anyone else has this problem and finds this thread....

I brought home a PCI card from work, pulled the PCI-E card and had no problems with the PC card. Games worked fine... although a bit slow. So I know that it's either the PCI-E card or the slot on the motherboard (or some wierd driver conflict). I RMAed the card as defective and ordered a different card (went with a 6600GT instead). If that one works then it was either the card or driver issue... and I don't suspect the driver as I used newest versions of all drivers and had wierd short lines on the motherboard splash screen (sometimes) when the system was powered on, well before any drivers would have loaded. The "pattern" of the error in games looked like defective memory to me. The new card should be here in a few days.

-G