Something wrong with my Radeon HD4850?

[Chris]

I seldom play games on my rig (see sig below). Yesterday, I downloaded RIFT to play. The screen has a lot of blinking triangles. I updated the ATI driver to the latest and also the Control Center. But, no change. I am using a older Dell 2405 monitor (2004 vintage). ATI HD4850 is connected to Dell2405 via a DVI-D cable.

I need to identify where my problem is? Is it my monitor, or is it my video card?
By the way, I cannot overclock the video card. GPU is running at 625 and memory at 935 and temp is about 46c idle.

I also have an older game, Mini-Ninja, which has these shifting and blinking triangles.

Your advices are appreciated.

[Ed103194]

did you have lots of dust causing it to overheat? Might be the voltage, try increasing it a bit to see if that fixes the problem

[Chris]

Thank Ed. I removed the original fan from the video card, and replaced it with another fan. The heat sink is still in place. The reason being that the original fan is has the high pitch noise that bothers me. Any way it is at 48c at idle, and may shoot 65c and 91% Activity according to the AMD CCC Overdrive meter. Is the card too hot?

Which voltage are you referring to? The CPU, memory? I am not aware if there is a setting for the GPU voltage, so how do you change it?

[Bond007]

Those temps are fine...sounds more like a driver issue, but since you say you had it with both old and new driver I don't really know...looking at your sig you need a new video card anyway. It just doesn't fit with the rest of your build. Sorry I can't be of more help.

[Ed103194]

Originally Posted by Chris

Thank Ed. I removed the original fan from the video card, and replaced it with another fan. The heat sink is still in place. The reason being that the original fan is has the high pitch noise that bothers me. Any way it is at 48c at idle, and may shoot 65c and 91% Activity according to the AMD CCC Overdrive meter. Is the card too hot?

Which voltage are you referring to? The CPU, memory? I am not aware if there is a setting for the GPU voltage, so how do you change it?

Im referring the to graphics core voltage, you can adjust it in msi afterburner. Reason being is because many people said they get artifacts on their msi gtx570, and the way to solve it was by increasing the core voltage slightly, give that a try or invest in a new graphics card as the other person suggested because I replaced my 4890 with a gtx570 and never regret it

this 6950 at 199.99 after rebate is GREAT deal

NCIX.com - Buy MSI Radeon HD 6950 Twin Frozr III OC 850MHZ 1GB GDDR5 2XDVI 2XMINI DisplayPort HDMI PCI-E Video Card - MSI/MicroStar - R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC - in Canada

[Galcobar]

Sounds like memory artifacts, which are often a symptom of solder loosening over time due to heat cycles. I'd suggest looking around the web for images of video card artifacts for comparison to yours. If it is an issue of memory artifacts, baking your card is often a successful way to restore those connections. It's the home version of the technique used by most manufacturers to solder the components into place.

[yycraven]

Which version of the HD4850 do you have from powercolor, 2GB or 1GB or the 512MB
I thought my HD4860 could not be OCed as well but have it OCed now to 4890 clock speeds
using TRIXX

[Chris]

I read the RIFT forum, and there are a lot of rift gamers running very slow in this game (10-20 fps). I was able to make mine running at 40 fps. So, I do not believe it is my video card. It can certainly meet the game requirements by a good margin. My only trouble now is that flashing and shifting triangles. The game is still playable. I also read somewhere that it is caused by the monitor lag time. So, I looked up the spec for Dell 2405 and Tom's Hardware review says its latency is 20 ms which is rather high.. Could this be the cause?