Computer graphics issue

Ok, here’s my problem.

Last night I bought and installed a new secondary slave hard drive (I ran out of room on my primary drive). I had no seeming problems with installation, the BIOS recognizing it, partitioning or formatting.

I had removed the video card, because I needed the room to both remove the primary drive to read the jumper settings, as well as install the new secondary drive.

After disconnecting the video card from the power supply and removing it, I removed the original primary drive, and set the jumpers to it’s correct master drive settings as per the manual.

I then made sure the new drive had the corrrect jumper settings for a slave drive,
re-mounted the original hard drive (the one that contained everything on my comp at that point, OS as well as games and apps), mounted the new secondary drive, and replaced the video card in the computer, rehooked all the various power supply and IDE cables correctly, rehooked the comp. up, and started it.

My comp specs:

AMD Athlon 2400XP+
ABIT KD7A motherboard
1GB Corsair ValueSelect PC2700 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
Maxtor Diamond Plus 9 80GB(original primary drive)
Seagate Barracuda 250GB (new secondary drive)

Started up just fine, recognized the new drive in BIOS, as well as Windows XP (My OS), I had zero problem partitioning and formatting the new secondary drive.

I likewise at first had no seeming problem moving the non-app media on my primary drive to my new drive (movies, videos, and text documents). I left all my games on the same primary drive as my XP OS. (C: Drive)

I started up Civ4, and saw right away I was having graphical flickers and glitches I’d never seen before. I didn’t see it in the game menus, but when I got in the game itself, the minimap as well as the regular game space was flickering with triangular glitches and various random flickers.

I un-installed Civ4, re-installed and re-patched it, and it didn’t fix the problem.

I then updated my video card drivers, restarted Civ4, still didn’t fix it.

I used my google-fu and got the advice to try both changing the AGP Aperature Size to 64MB as well as disabling AGP Fast Write within the BIOS. Tried both seperately, neither had any effect, and changed both settings back in the BIOS.

I’m getting and not getting these flickers/glitches in various settings.

Civ4 I don’t get them in the menus or the in-game movies, but get them in the minimap and game itself, as I said. World of Warcraft I don’t get it in the login menus or character select, but I get it in the game itself. I don’t get it in Zoo Tycoon at all, I get it in Age of Empires 3 in the game but not the menus or in-game movie. I don’t get it in Stronghold 2, I don’t get it in Dragonshard, I get it in Black and White 2 from the choose-your-creature tutorial on, I don’t get it in Age of Mythology, I don’t get it in Rome:Total War.

Those are all games installed on the same drive as the OS. (C: drive)

To test, I installed Doom3 on the new drive (F: Drive) and got the same glitches from the intro in.

I’d previously moved movies/game video/text documents I had on my comp’s primary drive to my secondary drive after installation. On viewing them after moving, I got from very mild flickering to severe graphic corruption (think kalideoscope effect) intermittently when I replayed the video media I’d moved, as
well as a movie I had stored on another computer entirely on my home network (meaning if I stopped and restarted them, they didn’t flicker/glitch in the same places nor with the same severity consistently)

So, I’m not sure what else to try at this point. My sweety’s comp is at the computer doctor atm, when he gets it back home I’ll try his video card in my machine and see if I get the same thing (He has the same vid card in his machine) but beyond that I’m not sure where to go from here. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Did you try removing and reinstalling the video card in case it’s a seating problem?

How big is your power supply. Maybe your video card isn’t getting enough power with a 2nd HD installed? (I’m sure someone will be along shortly that could answer that)

Tried removing and reseating the vid card, nada. My power supply is only a month old, and it’s 550W, so I don’t see how it could be lack of power, 550W should be plenty of power for this machine.

Hell, 550W should be plenty of power for a machine twice as powerful as mine, shouldn’t it?

Yeah. I was thinking maybe you still had an old 250 or 300. Hopefully someone will be along soon that knows more than me (which won’t take much). Sorry I couldn’t be more help.

Thanks for trying, though. :slight_smile:

This is sort of grasping at straws, but is the power supply connector to the graphics card on the same wires as the new hard drive? If so, it may be that the drive is introducing noise into the DC supply that is somehow affecting the display. Try switching the connectors around and see if it helps.

Hope this isn’t your problem, but after a recent house move, my Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB) started exhibiting similar behaviour. I would typically get strange artifacts on the screen while playing games. First it was sproradic, then it got gradually worse. Before long it wasn’t only happening during game play, but also while surfing. Within a few days the card died.

Hope your card is still under warranty.

Is the card fan cooled? Is the fan spinning? Not all 550 watt power supplies are the same, the extra load could be drawing the voltage down. You can use Motherboard Monitor 5 to check it.

Hate to say it, but it sounds like one of two problems – hopefully it’s the first:

  1. Not enough voltage going to the video card, as was mentioned. If possible plug a dedicated lead from the power supply to the card (as opposed to one that may split off from another in use by a second device) A second device connected to the same line as the card may be “dirtying up” the power, resulting in inconsistent or insufficient voltage.

  2. Your card may be dying. My old card, two cards ago, a GeForce Ti4600, went the same way. Gradually increasing graphical glitches within 3D apps (only 3D apps; 2D apps did not exhibit any problems) until the card just up and died. I’ve seen it happen the same way with other cards, too.