Video Issue

[BobtheCkroach]

A buddy of mine has a weird issue going on. When he starts a few different games (Fear Combat, Fear's expansion, Serious Sam 2), it boots about, and about a second into the game, the monitor fades to black, then fades back it. After that it'll play fine for about 45 minutes to an hour, then it'll start doing it every 30 seconds to a minute.

It's only those three titles. He tried Doom 3, Quake 4, Half Life 2, FarCry and more and none of those titles do it.

Any ideas what might be causing it? No hardware changes were made.

AMD 64 3500+, 2 gig ram, Radeon X800XL, XP Home

He's going to try switching monitors tonight in case that's it, but that doesn't seem likely ,given that it's only a few titles.

[BobtheCkroach]

He tried new drivers this morning. Thank you for the suggestion, though.

[Caged Anger]

perhaps he's having some trouble with his direct x drivers? try running dxdiag
and see if there are any issues

[BobtheCkroach]

Follow up on this, since I forgot initially.

His directx did not have anything wrong.

He tried swapping vid cards. When he had his bro's vid card...no glitching. weirder yet, when his bro had his vid card...no glitching there, either.

As soon as he stuck his own card back in, glitching resumed.

sounds like a power issue to me, but he got a new power supply for christmas (630watt, i believe) and the issue was there on the old PSU as well.

I'm starting to think it's purely software based, maybe, and he's going to just have to re-install his OS at some point.

Anyone have any ideas?

[He Is Legend]

I was going to say try another power supply . or check the bios and see if anything got messed with

but as i see he's tried everything i would have tried i dont know :/ . i would deffinatly tell him to try and reformatt to see if that helps

or the video card itself could be shot

[BobtheCkroach]

I was going to say try another power supply . or check the bios and see if anything got messed with

but as i see he's tried everything i would have tried i dont know :/ . i would deffinatly tell him to try and reformatt to see if that helps

or the video card itself could be shot

Blaming the vid card would be reasonable, except that under the same stress in his brother's system, it ran completely fine.

As for his bios, he said he doesn't mess much and it should pretty much be @ default. He said that someone mentioned messing with the power that goes to the PCI slot b/c maybe the card needs more, but he said there's no setting like that in his bios.

[Die Hard]

Why are North Americans so fixated with power supply and ampage/volts? It's never an issue in Western Europe. Do you have an unreliable supply??

[He Is Legend]

newegg.com diehard haha