Random Freezes/eratic Colours In Wow/aoc

[GaiusMaxwell]

hi,

 

I just bought an inno3d 8800GT OC edition to replace my gigabyte 8600gt, i uninstalled the 8600gt and used a driver cleaner to get rid of anything left.

 

I installed the 8800gt and installed the latest drivers from nvidia, i played CSS for awhile but i mainly play wow and just randomly, no particular time, could be 5 minutes after logging in, could be 8 hours and it might not even happen, but it will randomly freeze and i will not be able to minimize it or bring up task manager (the mouse is still moveable) other times my whole computer will freeze and i wont be able to move the mouse and other times all the gfx in wow just go absolutely crazy colours and highly pixelated then freeze, all these force me to do a manual restart

 

i play with all gfx on high at 1280x1024 on an acer AL1916 19" lcd monitor

 

any ideas whats causing this?

 

p.s: i wish i could get a screenshot of the wild colours but the comp freezes almost instantly after it happens

 

Thanks,

love

[gmupatriots2009]

hi,

 

I just bought an inno3d 8800GT OC edition to replace my gigabyte 8600gt, i uninstalled the 8600gt and used a driver cleaner to get rid of anything left.

 

I installed the 8800gt and installed the latest drivers from nvidia, i played CSS for awhile but i mainly play wow and just randomly, no particular time, could be 5 minutes after logging in, could be 8 hours and it might not even happen, but it will randomly freeze and i will not be able to minimize it or bring up task manager (the mouse is still moveable) other times my whole computer will freeze and i wont be able to move the mouse and other times all the gfx in wow just go absolutely crazy colours and highly pixelated then freeze, all these force me to do a manual restart

 

i play with all gfx on high at 1280x1024 on an acer AL1916 19" lcd monitor

 

any ideas whats causing this?

 

p.s: i wish i could get a screenshot of the wild colours but the comp freezes almost instantly after it happens

 

Thanks,

love

The first thing I would do is make sure the card is not overheating. This is the major cause of graphic anomaly you have mentioned. If you could, take your side panel off from the case and place a fan that blows air directly into your PC.....also....turn the fan speed of your GFX to max and use a software such as speedfan to measure the temps of your card. If the temps stay stable, ie. around 60-65C and your card still does this random freezes and showing crazy colors than there might be a chance that your card is a defective one and you might need to RMA it if you bought it online. However, I notice that you stated it is factory OC'ed. I would try to bring the card back to factory (Nvidia standard specs) which are 600MHz on the core and 900MHz on the memory and see if that get rids of the problems you are facing. For some reason lets say this does not solve your issue I would return the card and get another one instead. I wish you good luck. peace

[gmupatriots2009]

I apologize about multiple posts.....OCC forums have been acting weird lately

[GaiusMaxwell]

The first thing I would do is make sure the card is not overheating. This is the major cause of graphic anomaly you have mentioned. If you could, take your side panel off from the case and place a fan that blows air directly into your PC.....also....turn the fan speed of your GFX to max and use a software such as speedfan to measure the temps of your card. If the temps stay stable, ie. around 60-65C and your card still does this random freezes and showing crazy colors than there might be a chance that your card is a defective one and you might need to RMA it if you bought it online. However, I notice that you stated it is factory OC'ed. I would try to bring the card back to factory (Nvidia standard specs) which are 600MHz on the core and 900MHz on the memory and see if that get rids of the problems you are facing. For some reason lets say this does not solve your issue I would return the card and get another one instead. I wish you good luck. peace

 

ok, i have a few more things to report, the card clearly has a fan, is inserted into my first slot and has the 6 pin power plugged into the back, however, both everest and ntune display no temps for the 8800gt as if it never existed, both programs recognize that its there and show clock speeds but no temperature control or display is available, everything that has fan control is greyed out.

 

Also, the freezing and colours problem happens more of often than not when im listening to music in windows media player in the background (in game sound turned off)

[gmupatriots2009]

ok, i have a few more things to report, the card clearly has a fan, is inserted into my first slot and has the 6 pin power plugged into the back, however, both everest and ntune display no temps for the 8800gt as if it never existed, both programs recognize that its there and show clock speeds but no temperature control or display is available, everything that has fan control is greyed out.

 

Also, the freezing and colors problem happens more of often than not when im listening to music in windows media player in the background (in game sound turned off)

 

You know I have heard from certain folks that some cards come from companies set at 100% fan speed and it cannot be changed. I dont know if this is the case with your card but it could be very well possible. I would recommend that you take the card speeds back to stock, take off your PC's side panel if you can, than place a fan blowing air directly on the components......see if the problem happens then. If the card still shows the same problem than I would RMA the card and get another one. Do not wait any longer if you find that you cannot solve this issue easily and just RMA the card before the warranty from the online store runs out. If you can get a replacement that atleast gives you the opportunity to get rid of the fact that the card is the only problem. I hope this helps

Edited June 29, 2008 by gmupatriots2009

[GaiusMaxwell]

ok, ive done a few tests and got some very weird results

 

First i tried taking the side off my case and blowing a fan directly into the pc and did about 2 hours of light gaming (eg, css, wow on low settings) then 3 hours are hardcore gaming, playing COD4 at full settings, wow at full, AoC and crysis

 

I did the same tests with my normal setup, absolutely no freezes or problems at all

 

so i went back to the windows media player thing, i opened wow, opened windows media player, started playing as normal, listened to through fire and flames by dragonforce (about 7 minutes), it was on repeat, 1 minute back into the song erratic colours filled my screen and my computer froze. this happened twice

 

It seems that WMP is causing it? could their be some kind of software confliction? maybe not even a video card problem?

[gmupatriots2009]

ok, ive done a few tests and got some very weird results

 

First i tried taking the side off my case and blowing a fan directly into the pc and did about 2 hours of light gaming (eg, css, wow on low settings) then 3 hours are hardcore gaming, playing COD4 at full settings, wow at full, AoC and crysis

 

I did the same tests with my normal setup, absolutely no freezes or problems at all

 

so i went back to the windows media player thing, i opened wow, opened windows media player, started playing as normal, listened to through fire and flames by dragonforce (about 7 minutes), it was on repeat, 1 minute back into the song erratic colours filled my screen and my computer froze. this happened twice

 

It seems that WMP is causing it? could their be some kind of software confliction? maybe not even a video card problem?

From what you have explained, it definitely seems to be a conflict with WMP and any game running simultaneously. I would try to use some other media player, such as real player or even better, VLC media player since its very easy on the cpu. Try this and report back, I am confident that your issue is WMP related and nothing else.

Edited July 1, 2008 by gmupatriots2009

[Rokkaholik]

WinAmp is a great free media player as well

 

 

http://www.winamp.com/

[Omegaboost]

ok, ive done a few tests and got some very weird results

 

First i tried taking the side off my case and blowing a fan directly into the pc and did about 2 hours of light gaming (eg, css, wow on low settings) then 3 hours are hardcore gaming, playing COD4 at full settings, wow at full, AoC and crysis

 

I did the same tests with my normal setup, absolutely no freezes or problems at all

 

so i went back to the windows media player thing, i opened wow, opened windows media player, started playing as normal, listened to through fire and flames by dragonforce (about 7 minutes), it was on repeat, 1 minute back into the song erratic colours filled my screen and my computer froze. this happened twice

 

It seems that WMP is causing it? could their be some kind of software confliction? maybe not even a video card problem?

 

 

Ik this topic is kind of old but I've been having this problem for quite a few months. I originally put my rig together maybe 2 years ago. I am having "LITERALLY" the same problems you have described here. It has taken me forever to find someone else with the same problem as me. The only difference is I'm running a 9800 gx2. I've noticed that for some reason whenever I play a game, and listen to music or watch a video (I've tried WMP, Winamp, and VLC) no matter what, generally within 20 min my monitor goes into crazy color mode which pixalates everything and basically replaces as all the bitmats with insane colors. I have a bunch of screen shots ( here is the link http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/30119251-4.jpg ---> this one is from TF2) Generally I got good at avoiding when this happend and I narrowed it down to only when I had any video/audio program open and was playing a game. Well it eventually got worse and worse. It got to the point when it would freeze just by having a media player open. I've tried 2 different monitors and they yielded the same result. So I dealt with this problem for a few months, listening to music off youtube instead of WMP or Winamp or Vlc until tonight. I was in a 10m ICC raid on festergut and right before we started the fight it swapped all the bitmaps around so the screen went bezerk like in that tf2 screen shot. So I thought, oh great now this. So I restarted, got back to the login screen for wow, same thing happnd. I restarted again, this time the windows loading screen did the same thing. Thats right, it didnt even get passed the windows loading screen. I said fine I give up. I let my rig cool down for about an hour and a half, made sure everything was back to room temp, and turned it back on. I logged into my user account for windows XP x64 and it got about 2 minutes of runtime before it did it again. I'm to the point in which i cant even use the thing anymore. I've done a lot of gaming with this card for quite some time. I've probebly logged 3,000 hours of gaming onto it, nevermind just letting it sit on or watching movies. I'm begining to think that maybe the fan inside my gpu isnt cooling properly and it was faulty to begin with and has just gotten worse and worse as time goes on. I'd love to post some info on the temp of my gpu's but unfortunatly i cant even get onto my desktop. I've narrowed my choices of what to do down to 4 things .

 

1. Take the card apart, reapply some arctic silver to the gpu heatsink and replace the fan

2. get a http://www.inno3d.com/products/graphic_car..._ac_extreme.png and hope it fits

3. Call Nvidia and complain and hopefully they fix a 2 year old gfx card

4. Take a hammer to it

*5.* i added another option, buy a new gfx car and use this one as a really really big paperweight.

 

If anyone has any other advice please let me know, or if any1 else has had this problem with another card or knows of anyone with this problem let me know. Thank you

 

 

Also since it went crazy color mode on the windows login screen I doubt WMP, Winamp, or VLC is the direct cause of the problem. Its definetly related somehow to the problem though. I'm thinking the problem is basically the gfx card is too stressed running things like wow (ik its hard to imagine wow's graphics stressing anything) and videos and its overheated too much. This happened a lot to me. I think now I've maybe fried the card since its bugging out so bad now. But I also dont really know what I'm talking about when it comes to this. Hence why I'm here asking things. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Edited April 21, 2010 by Omegaboost

[ebarone]

Well if its really a software conflict, cant you just re-install Windows and see if it goes away? Or perhaps there is a hard drive corruption where your graphics drivers are.. who knows. Try imaging your OS, nuking the drive, then run chkdsk on it and see if anything bad comes up. Then re-install Windows, see if the problem keeps happening. If it does keep happening, get a new card and re-mount your system image. If not, then just go through the fun process of re-installing all your games and you're gtg again

[Omegaboost]

I think it had something to do with the software that nvidia gives you with the nvidia control panel. I've downloaded and reinstalled the thing like 4 times and there are still things wrong with it. When I click certain tabs I get the BSOD. So I disabled all of my unnecissary startup things from MSCONFIG.

it ran fine for about and hour which enabled me to install rivatuner and get everything under control. After about an hour of just light gaming my gpu temp was up to about 78c . Is that high for a 9800 gx2?

t

t

[ebarone]

Just a quick google search returned that a 9800GX2 can get up pretty hot, in the 90s, and still be fine. Glad to hear it works again for you =)