Video card...or something else?

M

Masterfulks

New Member
Hi, I'm searching for some help...

I just purchsed a new 320gig hard drive for my Dell 8300 with the Radeon 9800 vid card.

After ghosting over my old hd to my new one, everything seemed to be working fine. I put in my old slave hd, and at first things were fine. Then I started to get verticle color lines and blocks of color on the screen. It got worse as I tried to do anything.

I shut down, took the slave drive out and rebooted. Still same issues. So I went back to the original HD. It still had the lines.

I opened up the case to reseat the vid card thinking that I might have moved it some on accident. Then everything was clear again.

So I switch back to the new HD and get the same damn color lines. After reseating the vid card again, with the case open, everything was fine. I tested lighting moving the monitor cable where it connects to the tower, and that caused it to get worse.

I then tested by lightly pulling on the power cable where it connects to the vid card. That also caused the flicker.

After several reseats, and startups, it appears that any slight movement of the card will cause these lines to stay on my screen. I opened up a game just to see how it would handle it. Counterstrike opened, but it was a mess of colors.

Any ideas? The card is clean as best I can tell. Even just standing the tower up causes me to go from clear, to covered in blocks and colors.

Before today I've had no problems with the card at all.

Well that's my story. Any help would be much appreciated. My next step was to go find a local computer store that would let me test out another video card. Unless you guys have any better ideas.
 
Test it with another card, but it's almost certinally a problem with the 9800. I'm not totally sure of the cards power requirements, but are you sure it's getting enough power?
 
It's getting the same amount of power that it always has...

My power supply is stock, and it was running fine.

Would my new hard drive pull a lot more power to disrupt it? I was a little concerned about power usage before the switch, but was told that the size of the HD shouldn't matter with power usage.

For other components, I'm running an audigyz sound card. Though the card has been in there over a year.
 
Ok, now for some reason it's decided to clear up.

Although when I scroll up in an online window it's very choppy. Like a game running with a crappy framerate.

Maybe I'll try Counterstrike again in a minute and see if it can run it at all.
 
Are the drivers installed? Many times when they aren't installed, a "default" driver will load and typically run correctly, just unaccelerated.

And the question wasn't that you were getting the same power, it's if you had enough. Dedicated video cards require more power than onboard ones. You didn't specify what you originally had, but I can pretty well assume the 9800 requires more power. And, though the requirement's nothing compared to say an 8800GTX, it still could be more than the original PSU can handle.
 
a 300W QUALITY PSU would usually be ok with a 9800, but if your using a PSU that came with your case, it might have started dying when you installed the new hd, and now its affecting the card

(just an idea)
 
Thanks guys.

Yeah the power supply came with the Dell. If power was the issue then when I revert back to the old hard drive, why doesn't it clear up?

Or do power supplies die slowly?

The drivers are current, and just to be sure that wasn't it, I updated them anyway.

I'd just hate to get a new power supply and boot up with the same issues.

I've never had to take a computer in to a store for any kind of testing, so that will be an interesting experience.
 
Oh and the 9800 came with the computer. So that was the original setup.

The only thing that is different from the original configuration is now I'm running a 320gig hard drive(instead of the stock 60gig), a slave 40gig, and an audigyz sound card.

I did upgrade to 1.5gigs of ram a year or two ago as well.
 
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