[Burger]

I'm having computer issues with every single game that I play. If I try to play something, eventually my PC crashes, often quite quickly. When it does so, I see an image similar to this.



Now, it generally shows different colours (based on what was on the screen at the time I believe), but other than that it pretty much always looks like this.

I thought it might be a video card driver issue, but upgrading my drivers twice (about 6 months ago, and finally today) did nothing to fix the issue. I thought it might be monitor driver issues, and I could not find drivers for my monitors. But as far as I can understand Plug and Play should work just fine. Also, I did not have these issues for about 3 years with my computer, so if it is the monitor drivers, it sure took a long time for these issues to pop up.

I considered how it may be my video card overheating, though my GPU has a built-in fan, my PSU obviously has a built in fan, and I added a thermaltake cooling unit, and again, overheating has not been a problem for an entire 3 years, even during the summer I've never had issues.

The fan on my mobo is busted, and I've thought that that could be the issue. But all the examples of over-heating mobos on the internet do not look anything like what is happening to my computer (I think).

The thing is, I crash when playing when I play any game, that's Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day Of Defeat: Source, Medieval 2: Total War, World Of Warcraft (kicked that addiction), Sins of a Solar Empire. All these games worked for quite some time without this issue popping up.

What makes me assume that overheating is not the issue at all, is that I've never crashed when I haven't been playing a game (maybe once during the course of 200 or so of these crashes). Even extremely demanding 3d apps do not cause this problem, whether I'm working with millions of polygons or rendering an extremely complex image that takes an hour and a half or more to finish.

After these crashes, I restart the computer, and sometimes I see the same types of artifacts while the computer is rebooting. They either go away, or my computer seems to stop loading and my monitor turns black. When it does this, holding the power down button and then turning my PC back on pretty much always restarts the PC without issue.

I'm running an Nvidia 7800GTX, AMD 3200+, and 1 gig of ram, but again, my PC was problem free for a couple years. Eventually this issue popped up, and slowly built up in frequency to the point where it happens every time I load up any game, even old ones like Half-Life 1... If I'm insistant on playing a game I can restart my computer 3 or 4 times and if I'm really lucky I might get away with playing for 30 or 40 minutes, but for the most part it happens within 2 minutes or so of loading up a game. (I have directX 9.0C from 2008, I believe I actually updated to try and fix this issue. But as far as I know, DirectX does not need to be updated in the same manner as video card drivers do).

This has been happening for probably about 6 or 7 months (perhaps more) and I've grown really tired of it. In fact I haven't touched any games for a couple months, but now feel the urge to play Half-Life 1 and 2.

I'm sorry, that was a bit long winded. I just hope that someone has an answer for my problem, or is familiar with my issue.

I hope someone will take the time to read all of this, thank you.

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If this was a crt, then I would say your overdriving the monitor with to high of a resolution.

SO, I think that this is an lcd. Start with the cable. is it vga or dvi? It could be a bad cable connection or just a bad cable. Do you have a different cable to you try? If you don't, then you could get a cheep cable from http://monoprice.com/

Perhaps you could borrow someone's monitor and see if the same thing happens there. If it does, then I think we are looking at a video card issue, as in bad hardware.

[starjax]

If this was a crt, then I would say your overdriving the monitor with to high of a resolution.

SO, I think that this is an lcd. Start with the cable. is it vga or dvi? It could be a bad cable connection or just a bad cable. Do you have a different cable to you try? If you don't, then you could get a cheep cable from http://monoprice.com/

Perhaps you could borrow someone's monitor and see if the same thing happens there. If it does, then I think we are looking at a video card issue, as in bad hardware.

[Burger]

If this was a crt, then I would say your overdriving the monitor with to high of a resolution.

SO, I think that this is an lcd. Start with the cable. is it vga or dvi? It could be a bad cable connection or just a bad cable. Do you have a different cable to you try? If you don't, then you could get a cheep cable from http://monoprice.com/

Perhaps you could borrow someone's monitor and see if the same thing happens there. If it does, then I think we are looking at a video card issue, as in bad hardware.

Thanks for trying to help out. It's a 1680X1050 LCD VGA monitor, but it's passing through a DVI adapter. The most I've done with regards to the cable (with the intention of fixing this problem) is to move the DVI adapter to the port next to it which did nothing to fix the problem. It's taken about 3 years for this issue to develop. The only thing is, if it's a cable issue, why does it only happen when I play a game. I might be able to get my hands on an old CRT, but I don't have access to it right now.

There are a lot of things that I think could be causing the issue but when I consider that this only happens when I play a game (even an 11 year old game like Half-Life 1), most of my theories just don't hold up.

Thanks again.

Edited by Burger, 31 March 2009 - 08:52 PM.