[ShadowGorrath]

Hey,

A friend is having trouble with her PC. It's doing random stuff that makes it impossible to view anything. At first I thought it was a problem with the monitor, until I saw the problem in the screenshots. I don't know what's wrong, so I thought maybe you could help her?

I attached the screenshots below. What might the problem be and how can it be fixed?

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[Jeff Vader]

I think mama's computer did that or a similar thing in the past. Probably related to the GPU, as I tried other monitors with it and still got it. It was really random. At some point that occurred maybe once in a week or two weeks, now it has been several months after the last occurrence.

[Rick James]

Hmm. It is possible that the GPU approached critical temperature without quite going over the threshold, and stayed there for quite some time. That's the only thing I can think of that could cause the bizarre visual effects.

[Fury]

Pick one; the computer has serious problems with airflow, the case has collected way too much dust, the video card fan has died or the video card is failing. Alternatively the card overheated because some smart ass tried to overclock it.

DVI/VGA cable being broken is also a possibility, but I don't think the effects can be seen in screenshots just like when the monitor is broken.

[DarkBasilisk]

I've had something similar to this, the graphics card is on it's last leg and will very likely soon go out all together. Time to replace it and investigate causes of why it fried so hopefully this won't happen again.

In my case I think it was a combined problem of the graphics card having issues to begin with plus poor airflow causing it to cook itself

[Scuddie]

This is a direct result of framebuffer corruption.  Nothing else causes that.  To find out if the damage is permanent, underclock the VRAM and reboot.  If it continues to misbehave, you have either bad drivers (not likely) or bad VRAM (not good).  If it doesn't continue, it means the supplied voltage to the VRAM was insufficient for the clock frequency to remain stable, or the frequency was just too high and it caused the VRAM to overheat or improperly refresh.

[Tyrian]

I had almost the exact same symptoms when my GPU failed.  It was running fine, then I did a driver update (I followed all the "rules", Driver Cleaner Pro, etc.), and the corruption started.  I tried everything, including installing Omega drivers (which helped a bit), rolling back to the prior driver version, and downclocking the GPU to 50 MHz.  In the end, it got progressively worse until a replacement became necessary.  Put in an nVidia 7600GT and haven't had a problem since.

[ShadowGorrath]

Ok, this problem is unimportant anymore for her. Thanks for the help though.

[Nuke]

bad vid mem or borked drivers

[colecampbell666]

Yup, that's a GPU problem.