XFX 8800GT Alpha dog xxx problem

[shaney]

Hi there.

I bought an Alpha dog 8800GT and it is causing me sooo so many problems!

Any game I play ie Crysis, COD4, Gears of war, pro evo08 etc crashes with red and green artifacts, I cant even ctrl+alt+del out it just freezes my whole computer and I have to reset it!

I RMA'd it back to Scan.co.uk and they tested and it worked fine!! Said it had been running Crysis on high settings for over 3 hours!

So im lead to believe its a problem with some other part of my system. Ive tried various drivers - new, old and beta - same problem. I had my CPU overclocked so I reverted back to stock settings - same problems! After thinking I had a heat issue with my case(one of the fans had packed in!) I bought a new case repositioned it so there was plenty of air getting in - same problem!

I tried down clocking the card to factory settings ie 600, 900 from 670, 970 - same problem! I realised the fan was set to 29% so changed it to 100% and still the same thing happens! Ive updated all bios, chipset, sound drivers. When it crashes the temp of the card is about 80c. The wierd thing is when I scan for artifacts using atitool for 40 mins there is no problem!

So Im sort of leaning towards a power supply issue. I have a Hiper type R 530W PSU. It has 2 +12V rails but the PCI-E connector is only using one rail which has a 20Amp output. Could this be the problem?

My system specs are: Core2Duo E6600 - 2.4Ghz
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
2x 1GB PC6400 Geil memory
2x Harddrives - 160Gb & 250 GB
Realtek HD onboard sound

I would really really appreciate some help and advice as im tearing my hair out over this!

Thanks
Shane

[Miker]

As that MoBo is using a old Chipset update the BIOS. 8800GT is PCI-E 2.0 and some Chipsets with old BIOS have problems.

[shaney]

Yeah ive got the most recent bios from the Asus site. Also PC wizard is showing my power/aux temperature as 84C! Could there be an issue with that?

[mivanx77]

When does the artifacts happen, does it happen a soon as you start playing or after a couple minutes of playing, which could dictate that you are having ram issues. Download and boot memtest with only one stick of ram in the pc and see if it finds any errors.

[shaney]

Well ive just been to a mates house to test using different components.

Tried his PSu, with my memory - red/green artifacts

Tried both his PSU and memory - it seemed to be ok but was only playing for 30 mins so could be fluke

Tried my PSU with his memory - red/green artifacts

Should I RMA this card to XFX?

shane

[Miker]

Run a bootable memtest.

[shaney]

Yeah I ran a test on saturday but it produced no errors!

[acerimmer]

that is quite a common problem for this card, take a look on other threads (including mine) they are all reporting the exact same problem as yours. Mine seems to have gone away when I turned my fan to 100% it has been nearly 2 weeks now and no green or red artifacts . XFX have a bios update for the fan too I think you can getit if you PM the support guys.

[xfxsupport]

There is a BIOS that may help, start a support ticket at www.xfxforce.com and then PM me the ticket number.