Name: Anonymous 2006-01-14 23:06
What are the symptoms of a damaged GPU or Video RAM?
My video card has taken a beating during its lifetime.
It was sold as a 9800PRO, but was really a full-on XT PCB so I reflashed the BIOS back to normal and bought a beefy Zalman heatpipe heatsink. Once my brother took apart the heatsink and when he reassembled it he forgot the rubber spacers. I didnt know and I got some neat artifacts when I booted it up while some traces were shorted. Anyway, that was a few years ago.
Recently the video card has caused two system crashes. One happened while I was away, and one just happened. After the first one I noticed that Quicktime has some pixel-popping in the top of the video overlay and some games had some barely noticable graphics glitches. The second crash caused some pixel popping to become evident while using VLC. Winamp seems to play all the same files fine though. After each crash all the hardware acceleration stopped working even though it was enabled. I had to reinstall drivers and reboot several times before it came back.
The first crash happened while the computer was idle (I was away for a 3 weeks and it was just being used to serve a few files.) The second crach happened while I was working in Photoshop on a large PNG.
My video card has taken a beating during its lifetime.
It was sold as a 9800PRO, but was really a full-on XT PCB so I reflashed the BIOS back to normal and bought a beefy Zalman heatpipe heatsink. Once my brother took apart the heatsink and when he reassembled it he forgot the rubber spacers. I didnt know and I got some neat artifacts when I booted it up while some traces were shorted. Anyway, that was a few years ago.
Recently the video card has caused two system crashes. One happened while I was away, and one just happened. After the first one I noticed that Quicktime has some pixel-popping in the top of the video overlay and some games had some barely noticable graphics glitches. The second crash caused some pixel popping to become evident while using VLC. Winamp seems to play all the same files fine though. After each crash all the hardware acceleration stopped working even though it was enabled. I had to reinstall drivers and reboot several times before it came back.
The first crash happened while the computer was idle (I was away for a 3 weeks and it was just being used to serve a few files.) The second crach happened while I was working in Photoshop on a large PNG.