New video card, same old problem.

[Space_Coyote]

IÂ’d been having messed-up colors (lots of red) and weird straight lines (artifacting?) with my XFX 6600 card intermittently whilst playing Wow (all I play). I sent it back to XFX and at first they told me it was fine. After they tested it in WoW like I told them to, they said it failed and they replaced it (5 weeks later mind you) with a 6800 XT. I got it last night and was enjoying higher FPS in the battlegrounds when the game froze. After a min of nothing happening, I closed down WoW and restarted it to find the same red color on the text everywhere and weird small blocks etc on the loading screen.

So now I guess I have some other hardware issue. Whilst my card was RMAÂ’d, I had to go back to my old 4800 Ti. It was obviously REAL slow, but I had no display issues whatsoever in over a month of playing. Could my ancient Athlon 1800 and Abit mobo be causing bottlenecks with the faster cards? Would this cause the issues IÂ’ve described? I could swear that a messed-up display would be the GFX card, but now how can it be? IÂ’m just worried that this mightÂ’ve screwed-up my new card.

I even bought a new Hiper 580W PSU, thinking maybe my old one was crapping out on me. IÂ’ve never overclocked, do you think speeding-up the CPU, mobo and memory would help until I get my new system early next year?

 

[King X13]

just a crappy card in my opinion if you keep having problems. if it works fine with your 4800 and not your 6600 then its not any other hardware issue then video. buy an ATI.

 

[Space_Coyote]

Hmmm really? I can see the one card having problems after I've had it a few months, but a brand new one out of the box?

I'm using current video drivers from Nvidia's site, do you think it might be worth trying older ones or something?

 

[Space_Coyote]

It locked-up twice again last night, forcing me to reboot both times. The game freezes, and so does everything else. The first time I was able press Ctrl-Alt-Del to get the task manager up, but it loaded like 1 pixel at a time (lol) and took over a minute. Then I heard a quick beep and got a blue screen saying that windows had to restart, referencing a problem with an NV4 driver file or something.

The second time it just froze and nothing would come back so I had to turn off the PC. IÂ’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the lastest NVidia drivers from their website, but nothing seems to help. Does it still sound like the video card?

I was playing around in BIOS (blindly because IÂ’m a noob) and I see my mobo will only go up to AGP 4X, could this cause a problem with the 6800 XT, but not my older 4800 Ti? I noticed the AGP aperture said 64M, there was 128M or 256M options so I clicked 256M hoping that might help but nope, was that wrong?

Please help, I still believe (not quite sure why) that itÂ’s an issue with a driver or BIOS setting that could be easily resolved. Are there any known issues with drivers for this card?

 

[Space_Coyote]

Anybody? Should I look into updating the BIOS firmware maybe? I haven't touched it in years.