Hiya, I've got a Radeon 9500, one of the original ones that can be softmodded to 9700. For the past few months or so, quite frequently when I've turned the comp on, its been fine up till it loads windows, when there's lots of vertical bars on the screen like: It sometimes takes a few restarts to get them to disappear, but when they do, its fine. I can't really afford a new graphics card, and I rarely play games as it is, occasional HL2, BF1942 etc. Sound like dodgy graphics card? Would extra cooling help?
I Assume your running non-softmodded atm? If you are running softmod drivers, then its probably that. not all cards softmod perfectly. Indeed extra cooling might help. For starters i'd probably take off the heatsink, clean both the core and the heatsink free of the old paste and apply a fresh clean layer. Clean the heatsink if its dusty and make sure the fan is still working. if that doesn't work, then it may well be that the card has just had it
I had that once, on an old tnt2 32mb card. It was because somehow a tiny capcitor had snapped off, you could see where it had been atatched to the board at one point. Take a look over the card and see if anything's amiss.
