7600GS dying?

J

JSpecGC8

New Member
I have 2 computers one is my old system which I dont use to much and the current system that I have most of my fun on.

My older system consist of

P4 3.0ghz
2g ram (2x1g)
Asus mobo I am not sure which but it has an AGP slot no pci-e
550 w modular PSU
80g HD
7600gs vid card

My issue is the card itself, nothing else in the system runs hot but this card is idling at
50c and while playing games it gets really hot in the upper 60c range and I start seeing nice little square blocks of random colors start popping up on the screen. If I alt tab out of game and alt tab back in they disappear for a short while. This is even with a Zalman cooler on it.

I have no issues with FPS and most games run at moderate settings but it get really annoying to see this. I have tried setting all the details to their lowest settings but yet I still have this issue.

It has at times gotten to the point where the video is just unusable so to speak lines all over the screen everything garbled. When I tab out back to windows everything is fine. I have tried updating drivers cleaning out all old drivers and installing the latest ones but nothing seems to work.

Is this card dead, I got it new and its barely a year old but then stranger things have happened. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I would like to keep the extra system running, its still a good system but this video card issue is driving me nuts!
 
This may sound a bit silly, but have you overclocked it any? The colored squares you mentioned sound suspiciously like artifacts caused by running a GPU's core clock a bit too fast. Alternatively, did the manufacturer call it a 7600 GS *OC*?

If it's running at the nVidia stock core and memory speeds, the only other thing I can think of is a failure of the thermal paste between your aftermarket Zalman fan and the core. Unless, of course, the Zalman cooler is simply a heatsink (with no fan), in which case the lack of moving air is probably the culprit--which would explain why it runs fine for a while, and works fine for a little bit after you leave 3D mode (alt-tab out of games).

In any case, I'm fairly certain heat is the cause, we just need to figure out why it's heating up so much. Or other, smarter people on here know exactly what's going on.
 
I never OC the card but I cannot honestly say it was not an OC model from the manufacturer.

As for my cooler it has a fan but I didnt use AS5 I just used the stuff that came with it.

I can remove the cooler, clean off the GPU and apply some AS5 and see if that helps any but I dont think thats going to make a huge difference!
 
It may just be a failing card. It's not too uncommon for this to happen. I know one of my old cards began getting little "sparklies" in the dark areas of the screen when I was playing a game.

If possible, I'd try another 7600GS in the computer, or try the card in another computer to confirm it's the card.
 
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