ATI Radeon 9800 pro "weird problem"?

[Latvija13]

I just bought a new computer off of ebay. Everything was apparently in working order, but when I booted up the system the Window's XP logo, while it went through the loading process, had some small boxes in it, and the loading border had small brown spaces on it. However, everything on the desktop looked fine until I tried playing the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo. The video before the game loaded had small black boxes across the entire screen, then everything was ok until actually getting into the game. When the game loaded there were the same small boxes across the entire screen. This was only the beginning, I decided to try to reboot the computer, but this nothing worked correctly, the entire screen was totally messed up and if I physically moved the computer at all, the colors would change on the screen, or the patterns on the screen would change also. Originally I thought it might be a bad monitor, so I tried it on several other monitors with the same result. Sometimes when I turned on the computer the monitor would turn on, and the switch off after a few seconds with nothing appearing on screen, and then just turning off and on until eventually a garbled picture appeared. Next I tested Radeon 7000 64mb PCI graphics card and everything worked perfectly. So I'm assuming it's either the ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128mb, or the agp slot in the mother board which is a MSI 865PE Neo-2. I'm just wondering if anyone has any other ideas for what I could try to get this bad boy working? I tried everything I could think of, making sure everything was securely in place(I found when the screen wouldn't turn on at all if I applied pressure to the video card a picture might appear, but it would still be garbled. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[YourPrinter]

lots of artifacts huh? sounds like an overclock gone bad maybe
try to underclock it and see if it makes a difference

 

[Latvija13]

If it is an overclock gone bad, how does one go about underclocking a video card? I could be that considering there is 6 fans in the computer not including the power supply and video card fans.

 

[ChaosBlizzard]

Well how about telling us the other specs of your computer. For instance, the Power Supply. Also, did you update the video cards drivers from the manufacturers website? If so, did you contact the manufacturer to see if they had a bios update for your card? I had a serious irq confilct with my dads Radeon 9500 pro, wouldnt work with drivers installed due to confict. The ONLY thing that fixed it was a bios update fresh from the engeering dept. I had to request that the engeering dept take a look at my complaint. I also took note off all the conflicts..

 

[Latvija13]

The Power Supply is 400w
Ram DDR 512mb 2700

I'm not sure if anything else would help.
But yes, I got the latest drives from ATI, I didn't check for a BIOS Update yet. I'm wondering if the problem I'm having would be characteristic of a faulty agp slot or a faulty video card?

 

[ChaosBlizzard]

It could very well be a faulty video card. I dont think anything is wrong with the agp slot, only way to tell is find another agp video card and try it...