Games Freezing - Strange Colours on Screen

[Logan1981]

Hello!

I was having problems with some games. At first I thought it was the PSU but then I had my doubts and I'm pretty certain its the graphics card which is the problem. Anyway, heres a photo of the problem when it happens:

To explain the above a bit more. Basically, that happens. I can't get out of it. Sound still plays then after about a minute the screen goes black and I have to reset the PC.

Initially I thought temperatures. So I installed the Arctic Cooling S1 and Turbo Fans. This seemed to help. Unreal Tournament hasn't frozen on me again since. However I recently installed LOTRO and after approximately 20mins playing, I got the freeze you see above.

Now I used NVMonitor to log the events and I don't think the problem is temperatures as you can see from this extract from the log:

Just before loading LOTRO:

Time of crash:

GPU peaked at 47'C, time of crash it was 46'C. For a Inno3D Geforce 8800GT 512MB that's pretty cool right?

So I'm left scratching my head a little bit. The card is not being overclocked - at least not by myself. Although the Inno3D Geforce 8800GT I have, is the Overclock edition, which is set at:

Core - 650 Mhz
Mem - 950 Mhz

Is the factory overclock settings producing this problem and should I knock it down some? If so, how much by? Note: This only appears to be happening, or has happened on a selection of games i.e. UT3 and LOTRO. I can play WoW or Crysis for hours without a problem.

Or is it something complete different? Your help would be grately appreciated.

Note. System details to left <---

Many thanks
Chris

 

[Evilonigiri]

Did you install the latest patch for that game?

Otherwise try decreasing the clock speeds down, like 600/900. If the issue persists, try swapping the card with an older card lying around.

If all else fails, RMA the card, could be very well defective.

 

[Logan1981]

Cheers. I'm gonna try first, cleaning my system of the BETA forceware drivers and reinstall the latest release version. If it still happens, I'll drop the clocks.

 

[Redline24]

I'm almost positive is your memory clock. Lower it 100MHz or so, and if it works, RMA the card.

 

[Shadow703793]

Its more likely your OC is a bit high.

 

[Logan1981]

The factory overclock? As I've not overclocked anything myself.

I'm almost positive is your memory clock. Lower it 100MHz or so, and if it works, RMA the card.

Confused! Do you mean that if lowering the memory clock fixes the problem, its a defective card and I should RMA it?

Thanks for your replies.

 

[RuFuS]

very very similar to overheating, is your video card memory cooled well? my friend got very similar problem and it happened suddenly after about 20 minutes in wow or GTA:SA his temps of gpu were pretty low but still i adviced him to lower the clocks and change driver, that gave no results but after putting a fan near his video card problem was fixed maybe its the memory that is overheating in your case?

 

[sailer]

I had a similar problem with a X1900 XTX Toxic water cooled card. The memory would heat up and the games either would freeze entirely or slow to a crawl, even though the temps were well below specification. Bad memory was the cause. I RMA'd the card, but Sapphire wouldn't cover the warrenty because the water pump had failed and they didn't gaurentee the water pump.