Sapphire Radeon 4850 artifacts at boot

[okassar]

I just finished building my new system and realized sometimes during boot the display has dots all over the screen and distorted colors. This happens randomly and 1/6 of the time only during boot. When vista loads these artifacts disappear. I tried using a load test using furmark and it was stable in a 30 min test with a low temp of ~38 C idle and a high in the low 70's. I am puzzled as to why it appears sometimes and only during boot. I tried reseating the gpu and reattaching the power cable, but to no avail. What do you all think might be the problem?

Specs:
650tx Corsair PSU
4gb Corsair TW3X4G1600C9DHX
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3
AMD Phenom X4 955
WD Black 1 tb
Antec 902 case
Acer h233h 23" lcd @ 1080p

 

[fill_d]

I just finished building my new system and realized sometimes during boot the display has dots all over the screen and distorted colors. This happens randomly and 1/6 of the time only during boot. When vista loads these artifacts disappear. I tried using a load test using furmark and it was stable in a 30 min test with a low temp of ~38 C idle and a high in the low 70's. I am puzzled as to why it appears sometimes and only during boot. I tried reseating the gpu and reattaching the power cable, but to no avail. What do you all think might be the problem?

Specs:
650tx Corsair PSU
4gb Corsair TW3X4G1600C9DHX
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P AM3
AMD Phenom X4 955
WD Black 1 tb
Antec 902 case
Acer h233h 23" lcd @ 1080p

I recently built a rig with a sapphire 4870 toxic which was doing the same thing as you mention. It got slowly worse with more glitches including loss of picture in 3d games but desktop displayed fine when alt-tab to it. I got a second identical card and sent that one back- new card worked fine- my advice, send it back soon as you can

 

[okassar]

I'm thinking of sending it back, but I just want to make that the graphics card is the problem, since I won't be able to test anything else until after I get a replacement graphics card back. It seems strange that it happens only during boot when it probably has low load. I haven't tried any games yet though.

 

[okassar]

Thanks fill_d, anyone else has any feedback?

 

[Andhrimnir]

I'm running a pair of nvidia 9800's, so this may not apply, but my system was having weird graphics crashes in some games. It turned out that the 'factory overclock' on the cards was not what it was supposed to be (memory clock was 30MHz too fast). I dropped the clock speeds to the values listed on the packaging and on Newegg and the problem disappeared. I'd check your clock settings against the manufacturer's listed stock clock speeds before you mail it in.

 

[okassar]

The GPU is at rated clock speed and I used artifacts scanning using ATI Tool and it had no errors for 30 minutes. However, I still see the artifacts sometimes at boot.

 

[gode]

dude, i had same problem and freaked, thinking it was my graphics card. After countless tests, I switched monitors and found that my acer screen was the issue.
Simple test is to try a different monitor.
Good luck.