Wierd video corruption and lock up

[cquinn]

I am having a strange problem that has recently started to affect my
source based games.

My background textures start to flicker, first a couple, then it spreads
to most of the background (walls, floor, objects, and eventually NPCs).
If I don't catch it in time and quit the game, it will eventually lock up the system.
(I do see a little flickering in Half Life, but it does not increase
of appear to affect gameplay when I checked).

When it first happened, it used to take a while of playing to see the flicker.
Now it is starting to happen after only a few seconds that I load a level.

I ran validate, and runsafe, and am still seeing the problem.
If I shutdown for a couple of minutes, and start fresh (to see if it might
be the system overheating or something), it still happens.

I have checked the forums, but I did not find a post that seems to
relate the same symptoms.

If you do know of a similar problem posted here or elsewhere, I'd
appreciate if you could point me in that direction, otherwise I
am looking for suggestions on what I might try next before
wiping my Steam folder and rebuilding everything from scratch.

Thank you for any assistance you can offer.

Heap: 256.00 Mb
1 CPU, Frequency: 2.0 Ghz, Features: AuthenticAMD SSE SSE2 MMX 3DNow RDTSC CMOV FCMOV

DFI Lan Party Ultra-D (Nforce4)
AMD Athlon 64 3200
1536 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT (currently on 78.01 drivers)
(Downgraded from 81.98 as part of troubleshooting).
Windows XP SP2.


Attached is a screenshot of the flicker effect starting.

 

[Beerdude26]

Well, that amount of RAM seems odd, and it may cause instability. Have you ever encountered lock-ups or artifacts (the green stuff) in any other game or application?
Second, artifacting (the appearing of weird flickering like you're having) is often caused by either overheating of the card, or the card simply becoming too old and showing small errors that cause the computer to lock up.

 

[cquinn]

No, I had not encountered problems in other apps...

But now (after I left if off for a while) the system does not seem
to want to boot up, and even though the fans start, I'm not getting
the power light on my case anymore, and no video signal is getting
out (I even swapped cards to check).

I think my motherboard or memory may have just flaked out.

 

[Destroyer.Sam]

Definitely an overheating problem. Your shit has already melted, it's too late to fix it now -.-

 

[cquinn]

That's one way to put it I suppose.

On further examination, it appears the fan on the video card
was dying out, so it might well be fried. I'll have to take the
board into a shop tomorrow to test the other components.

Good thing I'm working overtime this week. :|

 

[Barney Fife]

See if you can hook a better power line (one straight from PSU) into your Video Card.
What I do is that for my 6800 GT Ultra, it needs two power lines and you cannot use the Y power line for the same card, power line have to go through another device, so I did it this way:
Got one power line straight form the PSU into my video card and the extension Y line into my hard drive, Took second power line from the PSU into the other connector of the video card and the Y line into my other HDD.
Because when I first got the video card being over confidence and all did not read the instruction video card came with and almost ruined the whole thing, could not even power up the fan, after long and tedious trial and error (me and my hard-headed self) started reading the instruction and end up calling myself a smart-ass.

Good Luck.

 

[cquinn]

The 6600GT does not run off a seperate power connection.

Plus I've already tried swapping out the video card with two spare
PCI cards I have on hand, and it won't boot with them either.

At this point, I have to eliminate the memory as the problem, so
I can see if the other boot problem is with the CPU/motherboard.
If I can figure that out, then I will be able to test the video
card properly.

Unfortunately (on top of everything else), the shop I was going to
take it to for testing went out of business Feb 1st.

 

[Beerdude26]

BTW, if all that fails, it's probably the power unit (PSU) that failed. Failing PSU's = blue screens of death, not booting, etc.