hello recently have gotten a new computer and am having trouble with cs source when i try to play it. i experience some fluttering like motion when i move my mouse and switch weapons. and most important this happens:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/ [...] led2-1.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/ [...] led-17.jpg

sometimes instead of turning completely black and highlighting with black like in the first pic... it highlights with purple or gray.. this happens 5 mins into me playing

now i have experimented with graphics settings and its no go.. also if i put the maximum pre rendered frames to 0 it doesn't work at all (gives me some internal d2d error)

heres my hardware:

asus striker II formula
4GB mushkin ddr2 1066
EVGA 8800 GT 1GB
q6600

Got the latest drivers?
Are all your wires plugged in nice and tight and in the right place?
Are all the components seated tight and correct?
Is your card maybe getting too hot?
Have you overclocked anything or played around with the BIOS at all?

yeah i have latest drivers and wires seem to be fine. also in the bios i only changed the ram to 1066mhz and timing to 5-5-5-15 which is what the ram is exposed to be set at according to newegg product details.

how would i go about checking if my card is to hot? touching it lol?

If you're running the RAM at that spec, you might want to go back into your BIOS and make sure it's got enough voltage running on it. I think by default DDR2 sticks use 1.8v. So go back to NewEgg and find the RAM and see if it tells you the recommended voltage, then adjust accordingly. If it doesn't tell you, then add another 0.1v (1.9v total) to your RAM and see if that helps. If not, keep adding 0.1v more until you stabilize, but don't go past 2.1v or you may do some damage.

Also, to check for temps, go download a program called GPU-Z. It's a standalone .exe that tells you everything you need to know about your card and also comes with a built-in temperature monitor if your card has a thermal sensor on it (which most new ones do). Check that out and see what kind of temperatures your card is running at.

alright i set the voltage to 2.04 since on the site it said 2.0-2.1

now so far the color distortion hasn't come and ive also noticed when alt tabbing out from it.. it is ALOOOOOOOOOOT faster. before when i tried to alt tab from source it took like 5-10 seconds and now its instant. but i still experience that fluttering/skipping motion so hopefully the following data on my gpu temps will be conclusive

GPU temp: 74 C
GPU Temp: 66.8 C (it lists it twice (i DON'T run sli)))
PCB temp: 63.8C
Fanspeed 33%
fan speed: 696 rpm

also thanks alot for helping me man... very appreciated

oh i also have a side question... what is Bank Cycle time(tRC) and Command Rate(CR) for my ram

is it fine that its set at 31 and 2T respectively with my 5-5-5-15 timings

Well your temperatures seem pretty normal and looks like the RAM problem's been solved. I'd say turn the RAM voltage up to 2.1v and see if that helps anymore. If not, then put it back at 2.04 since that's not the problem.

As for your 'fluttering and skipping' I'd say try some of these things.
1 - Turn on Vsync if you can
2 - Play at the monitor's native resolution
3 - If anything else has been overclocked or tweaked in your hardware besides the RAM, either up the voltage a wee bit or turn it back to stock settings.
4 - See how much stuff you have running in the background while you're playing CS:S. Ctrl+Alt+Del will bring up your task manager and you'll be able to see how much your CPU is being stressed and what kind of processes are running and how much RAM is being used. I'd say if your CPU usage is exceeding 50% and half your RAM is being drained, then you've got something eating up your resources besides CS:S (it's not that intensive a game).
5 - Defrag your hard drive
6 - Spyware/Malware/Virus scans

Hope these help

CR and tRC I'm not too sure. All I know is that the lower the value the better, but running high speed RAM at 1T is pretty hard and so most people don't try it unless they've got REALLY good RAM. As for the tRC value, it looks a bit high, but then again I'm not sure what the norm is for your RAM. I'd say try setting it to 24 and if everything runs good, then leave it at that.

Edit - On my way home, so you won't hear from me again until at least 6 PM (EST). Hopefully someone else can help you in that time or you'll solve your problems.

suggestions #1-6 did not work except i didnt try #5,6 because i just reformated today and installed source and tested it. should i still defrag?

also cpu usage is at 2% with source open along with a commit charge of ~544/4995M and 27 processes

do you have this trouble in any other games besides cs:s?
Maybe a faulty card?

hmm its not happening in cod4 and counter-strike 1.6

i am so confused? is it the game itself? it ran fine with my old 7900GTX

It *might* be an issue with the game itself. What OS are you using? What OS were you using prior to the upgrade? If you are using vista now you could try putting it in compatibility mode and see if that clears things up, or check the games website and see if they have any new patches etc for new OS's

i was using xp before and am using xp again... before i used xp provided by dell but with this new computer my cousin burned his legit version of xp and thats what i use (with his legit key)

I don't think I understand what you are explaining about the fluttering motion, but you may want to try enabling V-Sync as it sounds like you are experiencing Screen tearing above 60 FPS (won't happen in COD4, not sure about counter-strike, as COD-4 probably is not running past 60 FPS)

Just a thought.

meh i installed older drivers and it went away lol

Are you doing a full clean out of old drivers as well? A lot of times when people get driver issues, the previous ones haven't been cleaned out completely.

yup i reformated and then installed driver