ATI Radeon 9800 pro card?

Question

Hi all,

I am having trouble with the above graphics card namely random pixels and banding on the screen. I have the latest drivers from ATI & have also tried a second monitor and cable just in case. I believe I've identified the fault by testing against another ATI Radeon 9800 pro card, so it's not the AGP slot or the drivers or the monitor. The symptoms are random pixels and banding on the screen. These items of noise scale when you change modes and the problem occurs when the card is cold. I've checked the heatsink fan which is all ok. Any advice/remedy will be very welcome, thanks in advance guys.

Answer 1

hi mate
this problem occued many moons ago to a geforce 4 mmx,and it had been damaged due to some wild overclocking,however even with damaged cards as like hard drives with bad sectors if you know what you are doing you can disable some pipelines and maybe get this blighter working correctly again
the obvious first solution would be a updated driver install(http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonx-xp.html)and a direct x runtime update(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en)
another thing to check is your agp aperture size,if you have this set to high it may cause some display problems,for a 128mb card you can set the aperture size to 64mb and for a 256mb set it to 128mb
however sometimes a card can just start to throw up problems,its the way they are manufactured,some crds are shipped with problems like this and sometimes you get a card thats a bit faster than a similar card,althugh the manufacturer tries to get the spec spot on,its not a exact science
although you have tried another 9800 in your p.c have you tried the card in question in another p.c,if it works fine then its a software issue with your p.c
as g.p.u,s are so complicated with shader,vertex and pixel pipelines unless your a engineer from a.t.i or nvidia its pretty near impossible to correct this problem
however why not try the nvidia official forums at http://forums.nvidia.com/
good luck mate!

Answer 2

If you've checked the monitor, the card and have all the latest drivers then the card is on it's last legs. You could try a new PSU, if your current one is having a few problems then it may not be powering the GFX properly

Answer 3

Replace it... probably hardware failure, not a driver or system settings issue. You've just got a bad card.