RAM or Graphics Card?

Question

My computer works perfectly all the time im not trying to play a game. However, when I try to play games such as HL2, CSS etc, I get this screen after about 1 min of playing.

What is the deal here?

Answer 1

It looks like your card is trowing rendering artifacts at you. It means that an error is happening internally and that the "data" coming out of the card are corrupt. This happens often when the memory chips on the card are damaged (due to excessive heat).

In short:

• It's fried. Get a new one.
• When over-clocking, make sure the card and the cooling equipment can take it.

Answer 2

I'd lean towards the graphics card if its an nvidia 8xxx family - basically the cards in question had a design flaw to do with the way they were designed. They tended to overheat and cool cause small cracks in the soldering between the card and the processor, causing unusual failure modes. The fix, wierdly enough is to bake it and the card this is most typically done with is the 8800GTX - google has lots of hits on it, and videos

I've also seen other failure modes from swedish-chefed bioses to simply dropping dead one day. Its probably the card. Memory should be trivial to test and rule out too.

Answer 3

Check your graphics card temperature to see if it's overheating or not(it should be below 60 degrees celsius, around 40 when idle).

Answer 4

Well there is tools testing both memory and video card.

I completly trust the memtest86, with pendrivelinux you can easly create a bootable pendrive with memtest on it. After you restart your computer and select to boot from usb. Memtest will start automatically and you will understand the process, just leave it go twice fully.

Testing the videocard could be more tricky. For example I had a card which wasn't working properly with games, but still did okay in every test. I know it was bad, cause after I changed it all was good. You could try FurMark and 3dmark, both got free to use versions.