Radeon x850XT Artifacting - Overheating?

jamieoliver22

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Hiya all.

I have a fairly new (only had it a few weeks) ATI Radeon x850XT. Recently, I have noticed that it has started to atrifact really quite badly in high end games.
Because of this, I thought that it was an overheating problem, so I downloaded ATItool and made my fan speed as high as I could, just to see if it would help. It did help, but still artifacts slightly later in the games. I have also noticed that the artifacting only starts to happen when the card reaches the 50 degrees C mark. My usual tempertures when just running basic Windows programs is between 36C and 41C. When in games, temps can get as high as about 52C.

Is it overheating that is causing the problems? Do I need to buy a cooling system?

And this may be a long shot, but could it also be because of any faulty RAM, because yesterday I ran Memtest86 and it returned 14 errors. And also, could it be because of any lack of power?

My specs:
> ATI Radeon x850XT 256mb
> AMD Athlon 2600+ (2.1ghz)
> DVD RW and DVD-ROM
> Two HDDs - 80gb and 320gb
> MSI KT400 Ultra motherboard

Thanks for you help,
Jamie.
 
Have you been overclocking? It's usually because of a unstable video card.
 
No, not overclocked at all. Nothing has been altererd since I got it out of the packet, only the fan speed (as said in first post).
 
You can hear the fan turn on when you switch the computer on yeah?

I would contact ATI, get some advice from them.

Did you buy it online or from a shop?
 
I hear the fan fine, yeah. I brought it from Overclockers Ltd.

And I have just contacted ATI, so I'll have to see what they say.

Thanks,
Jamie.
 
Sorry to double post but I got a reply from ATI. I think it is just an automated responce:

Based on our experience, games issues are usually due to improper system configurations, driver issues, faulty hardware or a known issue with the game and the hardware or drivers that you are using.

First ensure your system meets the minimum requirements of the game and that you have any patches from the game vendor installed.

It doesnt really help at all, can anyone else?
Is it really an overheating issue? Because I wouldnt have thought that 50c wasnt greatly hot, and its odd that it only starts when it only reaches 50c and seems fine at 48c-49c.

Thanks,
Jamie.
 
Well...you could reinstall your drivers just to be safe. Also, make sure your games are up to date, because they could've fixed up some bug with a hotpatch or something. If it still persists, it could be your video card. The stock cooler is designed to cool the GPU decently, so it should do it's job fine, unless they installed it incorrectly or something.

50c isn't even that hot. Sometimes, the NV43 core (6600 series) can get up to 60c, but then again, they're designed to withstand that much heat.
 
well it could be because of overheating.
50C isn't that bad and shouldn't be too much, but all of the other stuff makes it look like an overheating problem.

A better cooling system wouldn't hurt, but I'd do what ever test possible to make sure that it's an overheating problem before buying anything.
This is one way to test, but the effects really depend on the air temperature. If it's cold outside then just take the side of the case off, open a window and put the computer right next to the window. Like last winter it was around -20C outside and when we did this with my friends computer the artifacts just didn't appear anymore. So we knew it was because of the heat and then he bought a new fan and now his vid card is working great.
 
52 degrees C for a graphics card isn't that bad at all...

Considering its fairly new and has been doing it almost from the start, I'd start to think that the card has developed a bad pixel pipeline somewhere on the card, causing artifacts.

The pipelines are just what renders the entire image on the screen, and a faulty one would of course cause corruption, etc somewhere down the line, just like you'd get if you were doing a spot of overclocking and went too far.

So I'd possibily try and get the card sent back. It doesn't seem like its the temperature causing it to me what so ever, if the fan is working correctly.
 
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