6600GT 32bit colours show "sparkles"

[Tirlista]

My friend got himself a Leadtek PCIe 6600GT which we installed on a 915 mainboard.

It worked fine for ~6 weeks, until the other week. In windows, having the res @ 1200x1000 for his LCD - sometimes he'll get "sparkles" all over his desktop.

I removed the drivers (which were the latest at time of install), reinstalled defaults and everything looked fine.

When you go into any games, there are heaps of missing textures and sparkles all over the screen.

We found with UT2004 you can change the colour levels, and anything less than 32bit would display fine. Doom3 and the Sims2 were screwed.

I am assuming it is RMA time, for faulty GFX memory. I will give it a go on my mate's DFI Nf4 first though (this won't happen until Saturday though )

Anyone have any ideas on this occurrance?

[THunDA]

Has it been overclocked ? Did he change the cooler ?

I would try to reseat the cooler .. but if it hasnt been touched then you'd be better off just rma'n it.. sparkles are definitly not a good sign..

[J-Mag]

yeah sparkles are usually what happens to my ATI cards when the GPU is clocked too high or heating up ...

It is not suprising at all that higher resolutions or higher color depths are causing it b/c that obviously puts more load on the card. I have noticed in the past that clocking my cards up at a certain point would work fine in 3d apps at 1600x1200 or whatever, but then when I enabled Anti Aliasing then I would start to get the sparkles...

Does this friend of yours tend to tinker alot with his machine? Cause it is possible he damaged the board itself ( i have done this but usually it doesn't create sparkles...)

Also check to make sure the fan is still working on the card. You could always try mounting a fat fan over the card or just take the sidepanel off and use a floor fan and see if that makes any difference. If it does then you know it is heat related.

Either way, as for a solution, I totally agree with Thunda... RMA is looking like it is in your bud's future...

[PCcrazy]

most of the 6600gt suffers from excessive heat...in my cases had 3 friends with leadtek brand and one with chaintech got overheating problem..they solved it by putting a vantec pci fan card...one of them RMA the card...since u know that Malaysia is hot country, we really need all extra cooling that we can possibly have..

[Tirlista]

Funnily enough, the card is running stock. Although I live in northern Australia and it is fairly warm at this time of year. Additionally the pc case the guy has, is fairly poor for ventilation.

Another friend of mine with a DFI-SLI, can't run 2x Leadtek 6600GTs even with the side off the case and some active cooling. He always ends up with artifacts after a few minutes.

Looks like we'll RMA the card and look into getting a decent aftermarket cooler for the replacement.

Thanks all!

[w00t!w00t!]

maybe its the lcd

[sado]

this may be a bit off topic. but what are artifacts?

[cirthix]

graphical errors, like checkerboard patterns, bright or dark spots, color errors like the sparkels you see