G450 DH corrupted display...

[gugusse]

Hello,

I don't know if someonone could help me about this. So, here's the story:

It began like small dots sometimes (black or drak grey if the background is light and white or light grey if the background is black) but a couple of minutes ago, it was worst than before.
It happens on two different OS (dual-boot Win2k and Win98SE).

I attached a JPEG of what it looks like...

I tried several things:

- Updated Via 4-in-1 (now I'm back to 4.32 because there were no changes)
- Tried different Matrox BIOS and divers versions: no changes.
- Different versions of PCI Latency Patch and even without it.
- Disabling "Bitmaps caching" with Tweak Utility: seems to improve a little but not resolves.
- Physical reinstallation of the video card
- Set a bigger "SubImage cache" (2048) with Tweak Utility.


My setup:

- MSI K7T Turbo Limited Edition
- Athlon XP 1600+ (1.4ghz)
- Win2K Professional Edition and Windows 98SE (dual-boot)
- NIC Startech (Realtek 8139 chip) in PCI 2 (IRQ 11):
- NIC D-Link DFE-538 Tx in PCI 3 (IRQ 10):
- Echo Mia Soundcard in PCI 4 (IRQ 5):
- Matrox G450 AGP (IRQ 5)
- Via AC'97 onboard sound controller on IRQ11
- HDD Quantum Fireball Lct-10 20 GB 5400 rpm on IDE 1
- HDD Maxtor 6 L080J4 80 GB 7200 rpm on second IDE of the Promise controller (running in standard IDE mode, not RAID)
- Plextor 8/4/32 (master) and CD-ROM 56x Affrey (slave) on IDE 2
- 4 in 1 drivers 4.32 installed on Win98SE and no 4-in-1 in Win2k.



Thanks in advance.

gugusse

[Wombat]

Looks like bad RAM or overheating of the memory. There's a ton of other possible causes, but that's the most likely, especially with that gradual worsening. The card is likely stull under warranty, go talk to Matrox about an RMA.

[gugusse]

Hi Wombat,

You're talking about bad RAM on the Video Card, not the mainboard RAM I hope...!


Thanks a lot.


gugusse

[Wombat]

Yes, the effect you describe tends to happen when the video RAM overheats, is overclocked, or is starting to go shoddy.