I bought a Gigabyte Nvidia GTS 450 video card on Boxing Day - I use it for a bit of light PC gaming, and it worked well for 3 days. Soon after, running any 3D apps/games would result in screen artifacts, missing/corrupt textures being displayed within 2-3 minutes. If left running, this would eventually lead to the PC freezing completely and/or a Windows STOP error/Blue screen appearing. After a hard reboot, I would sometimes find that Windows would start up using the default vga display driver, and I would have to re-install the Nvidia drivers.
I've performed a clean un-install/reinstall of the latest drivers at least 3 times, removed and reseated the card, and also tested running 3D apps using a clean (new) Windows user profile, none of which resolved the problem.
I took a few screenshots which illustrate the problem while running the Unigine Heaven benchmark/demo. You can see the scene is rendered normally at first, but the display steadily gets more and more corrupted. As the display gets worse, I've observed a significant drop in framerate i.e. the animation starts getting very jerky with a lot of stop and starts.
When monitoring the GPU core temperature, the problem begins appearing even at relatively low temperatures in the mid-50's C. I have a 450w PSU with a dedicated 6-pin power connector (which is in line with the recommendations for this card).
I've already got an RMA for the card and will be returning it for a replacement, but I'm wondering if there's any way I can check if the problem is in fact with the card, and definitively rule out any other PC hardware/software configuration.
FYI I'm running WinXP SP3 w/4gb of memory, on an Athlon x2 7850 BE/AMD AM2+ CPU/MB combo.
I'd be interested in any suggestions anyone may have before I pack it up and ship this thing off.
I've performed a clean un-install/reinstall of the latest drivers at least 3 times, removed and reseated the card, and also tested running 3D apps using a clean (new) Windows user profile, none of which resolved the problem.
I took a few screenshots which illustrate the problem while running the Unigine Heaven benchmark/demo. You can see the scene is rendered normally at first, but the display steadily gets more and more corrupted. As the display gets worse, I've observed a significant drop in framerate i.e. the animation starts getting very jerky with a lot of stop and starts.



When monitoring the GPU core temperature, the problem begins appearing even at relatively low temperatures in the mid-50's C. I have a 450w PSU with a dedicated 6-pin power connector (which is in line with the recommendations for this card).
I've already got an RMA for the card and will be returning it for a replacement, but I'm wondering if there's any way I can check if the problem is in fact with the card, and definitively rule out any other PC hardware/software configuration.
FYI I'm running WinXP SP3 w/4gb of memory, on an Athlon x2 7850 BE/AMD AM2+ CPU/MB combo.
I'd be interested in any suggestions anyone may have before I pack it up and ship this thing off.