Radeon 9550 problem

Hi. I built a computer 3 months ago. It has the radeon 9550 (sapphire). It has worked great but all of a sudden one day i turn my computer on and the screen is like out of focus and there are dots and lines every where of every color. i never overclocked this video card and i cant think why it whould do this out a sudden. any suggestions?

It actually sounds like a corrupted RAMDAC or Video RAM.

The GPU is barely used in just 2D Windows mode.

Texture memory is used somewhat, but only for resolution and color depth, which it hardly uses any of.

If your system seems like it's operating fine, you can see the mouse moving through the color and everything is still responsive, it's probably RAMDAC.

If it freezes randomly or locks up right when the screen goes corrupt, look to video memory.

Does this happen right when the computer turns on, POST report is corrupted, et cetera?
Does it happen when Windows begins to load?

Tests:
Does it happen in Safe Mode?
If no, it might possibly be a driver, you'd be lucky.
If yes, it's the card.

Hook it up to a DVI monitor if you can find one, does it happen now?
If no, it's your RAMDAC.
If yes, it's your video memory

Unless it's a driver, your going to need to RMA this card with Sapphire or whoever you bought it through.

F.Y.I. about the fan, a 9550 can be passively cooled and still run fine.
Production example:
http://www.msicomputer.com/product [...] &class=vga

However, your card is actively cooled and appears to only have a sissy small heatsink, if your fan was dead it might cause that bad of corruption, but not very likely.

Artifacting is caused when the 3D render engine renders a frame incorrectly, usually caused by a floating point error in the GPU. There is no 3D rendering going on unless he is running Windows Vista RC.

No, it's a bad video card then, probably RAMDAC.. the thing that turns the digital signal into an analog one for the monitor to display.

You will need to RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) from Sapphire or whoever you bought the card from, hopefully it's under warranty still.

Warranty Linkage for Sapphire:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/support/warranty.php