Graphics Graphics issue + possible replacements?

Hi Guys,

I have experienced intermittent graphics issues when gaming. Games such as Sins of a solar empire and COH will occasionally completely lock-up with thousands of green pixels, usually forming waves/peaks across the screen (No response from Ctrl+Alt+del). I have tried reseating and cleaning the card with air duster, and also installing the latest drivers to no avail. Thought about overheating, but the fan is spinning up fine, the case should have good circulation, and the game can freeze after only 15mins!

Following this both Scan and XFX have been unable to help much because the warrantly life has been exceeded. Both have stated though that it sounds as though it may be the memory on the graphics card. I have heard that I may still be able to run the card by adjusting things such as fan speed, or how resources on the card are used/allocated.

Ultimately, if it is the card I will probably replace it with a Geforce 250GTS, or ATI 5770 (Would be interested to know the consensus on whether having a higher spec dx11 card is worth the extra dosh.) Suggestions would be handy!

Would be interested to know thoughts on any of the above, thanks in advance for any replies. I know the obvious suggestion would be to try the card in another machine, but most of my mates now stick to laptops!

Rig:
Antec P182
ASUS P5K premium
Pentium Q6600
Corsair Dominator 4GB RAM
Corsair HX620W
XFX Xtreme 8800GT 512MB

 

If your warranty is up try the oven trick!

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1421792

If not, how much do you want to spend? The 5770 is a good upgrade from the 8800GT, it would be even better if you could stretch to a 5830, or a GTX 460 768MB, etc etc.

What's your budget?

 

That is a pretty insane thread. I guess that could be attempted if all else fails, however the symptoms seem to differ.

In terms of budget, I would say around the £100 mark. I don't mind spending a little extra if say having a dx11 card is advisable. Will I suffer with forthcoming games that use dx11, if I had the 250GTS which supports up to dx10?

I don't see the point in pushing upto the £200 mark for a new card because I wouldn't be able to use it to its full potential, the rest of my rig wouldn't be able to match its performance. As you can see from the original component list my rig is about 2yrs old now. I will probably stick to what I need now, and do a complete hardware upgrade in <2yrs.

 

Your rig won't bottleneck even the newest video cards to any significant degree, Q6600 is still a great chip.

Also, are you absolutely sure that it's your video card causing the problem? Can you try swapping in a different video card from somewhere?

 

5770 is perhaps best you could get around £100 mark

250 is not alot faster than what its replacing

 

In short I wasn't completely sure it was the graphics card causing issues, although I had ruled out some of the possible causes. Unfortunately I didn't have a spare PCI-e graphics card sitting around otherwise that would have been my first port of call. I ended up biting the bullet and buying a GTX 460, after reading a number of glowing reviews it just had to be bought!

I've used the card for a couple of hours, and touch wood my issues seem to have cleared. Early impressions are that I made a worthy choice for a replacement!