Is my Graphics card broken? - Tests done to get better idea

thomas_4th

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Nov 2, 2009
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Right, is seem to have a problem with what I think could be my graphics card and I'm hoping someone will be able to help me. I'll first state what I think caused the problem, the in game problems, then what tests I've done so far to give as much info as I can.

Card is an HD 3870

I think the fault was caused when I was playing crysis, there was a full system crash when playing the game and I was informed my GPU driver had been corrupted. I did a driver sweep and re install of the driver. Crysis booted up again up but when in the game menu there was a rather unhealth sounding buzzing. Like a fan at very high rpm but I wasn't any of the fans.


In Game Problems
- The two games are Crysis and Modern Warfare. Both games ran fine before the issue. With crysis I sometimes suffer crashes when levels are loading/initializing. It gets stuck then crashes. Other problems are that textures are sometimes not loading correctly. Bushes being multi coloured etc. Aliens with missing sections and their trails and the blue rays looking totally out of place and what I can only describe as seeing the plain polygons. This is on a mix of medium to low settings which used to run fine. Modern Warfare suffers slowdowns and crashed again on level initialization. That point when the level is loaded and the transition has started when the map is zoomed in on.


Test I've run:

SiSoftware Sandra - Both the Video Rendering and GPGPU Processing benchmarks seem to run fine and put the card where it is meant to be. The GPGPU Memory Bandwidth bench however gets stuck, does not complete and requires me to use task manager to close Sandra.

3DMark06 - Running the test seems to work fine with all different settings. The problem comes when I try and run the Filtering and AA tool. It doesn't work and I get this error - IDirectSDDevice9::Clear failed:Invalid call(D3DERR_INVALIDCALL)

GPU temp gets a max of 71 so heat doesn't seem to be a problem. My system is a Asus P5E board, Q6600 cpu, 4 gig or ram and a high quality 700w psu.


I know there is quite a lot to read but if anyone can help shed some light on what my problem might be or some other tests then that would be amazing.

Thanks
 

thomas_4th

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Nov 2, 2009
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Yup everything is up to date. The OS is XP.
I told the problems to a friend and they think it could be a faulty / damaged ram chip on the card.