PC Games are glitching really bad

[Neillithan]

Hi, I built a computer for a friend way back and he recently had to reinstall windows. After reinstalling windows, his computer has shown multiple signs of instability, although I'm not quick to blame the installation of Windows, I just want to know if these glitches have any kind of correlation with a deteriorating piece of hardware.

His hardware config is: Nvidia 8600 GTS, AMD 6000 X2, 2gigs of DDR2 800 ram, 750w PSU, Gigabyte ATX Motherboard.
Complete Hardware Summary: http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dcsf8qfg_252hbfhp2xh&revision=_latest

In 2d games like Civilizations, everything becomes distorted. Graphics, fonts, colors, you name it. Everything stretches out to wild proportions and becomes unplayable.

Here is a screenshot of the game in action:



In 3d games, I haven't actually seen the glitching (as I am not in front of his PC when it happens), but from what I hear it's the same kind of distortion. Fonts, textures, anything on screen will be twisted and it becomes unplayable.

The reason this is so confusing to me is because at first I thought it was a simple issue of overheating, but now I'm not so sure. I asked him to note the idle and load temps of his GPU. Idle, it's below 60C. Load is 66C. While glitching, the temp is 66C. For his card, I figured this was normal... Nvidia cards are known to run hot. I have an 8800 GTX and it idles around 60 and reaches about 68-70 under load. I never experience glitches. My computer is stable, aside from the occasional reboot.. I've just learned to accept it since I don't exactly have a stellar combination of hardware anyway.

Anyway, I've dealt with overheating video cards in the past... they all have the same pattern. In 3d games, polygons appear in places they're not supposed to. The polygons will extrude towards the center pixel of the screen. That kind of glitches is easy to correlate to overheating, but the glitches my friend is having, I'm not so sure about.

If anybody can offer some help coming to a solution or course of action, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
-Neil

 

[jason73]

I know this may sound like a stupid question but when he reinstalled windows did he reinstall the drivers for his graphics card after ? or did he forget to do that, if not that could be the simple answer to the problem, they also might want updating as well, this sounds like it could be a Antialiasing problem, some times updating your drivers can cause this problem as well, so you end up having to go back to the previous driver you had, drivers can be a pain in the arse some times.
have you tried turning the Antialiasing down a bit,
Also just out of intrest why did he have to reinstall windows, was it because he was having problems then ?

 

[Neillithan]

I'll have to double check the anti aliasing. When I first heard he was having problems, I prompted him to get the latest drivers for his video card, chipset and direct X.

As per the re-installation of windows, it was for no particular reason. I'm constantly harping people to reinstall after about a year just to keep things at maximum. Sometimes new problems arise and this is just another until it passes. Might have nothing at all to do with reinstalling Windows.

-Neil

 

[RCPilot]

It sounds and looks like 2 things to me.

1 weak PSU, even though it's 750w. Put a good tester on it and make sure all rails are working properly.

2 overheating vid card. Fan could be full of dust and not cooling or (as I've seen a dozen times) the fan came apart and is hanging by the innards.

 

[Jake_Barnes]

This topic has been moved from the section Tom's Hardware Forum related to section Games General by Jake_Barnes

 

[jason73]

Ok I just checked with a friend who has the same graphics, he as had the same problem in the past, it turned out the AA was turned on, so you have to go to the Nvidia control panel and switched it off and that fixed the problem,
Also driver 174.74 I believe is good for that card