ati 4570 mobility crashing

[mribrahimali]

hi, first of all my computer specs.

dell studio 1555 bought in October 2009
Pentium-d t4300 @ 2.1 ghz
4.00 gb ram
vista 64 bit
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570

A dialog box came up saying something along the lines of ati driver fail or something like that, then after that all of my games that require my graphics card have simply crashed at the loading screen, except tom Clancy's hawx which loads but the display has what seems to be a fractal over the screen( messed up shapes).

I have tried updating the video card drivers, nothing has improved. Ran diagnostics in bios, said nothing is wrong, tried reinstalling catalyst control center, nothing happened. I have now sent an email to dell support center.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Jasp]

Sounds like the GFX card is cooked or is overheating when clocking up to do 3D intesive things. The messed up shapes are artifacts and indicate a GPU fault.

I'd try a system restore as a last resort since dell are gonna ask you to do this anyway then i would pursue a RMA with it being under warranty.

[mribrahimali]

ok thanks jasp, just waiting now for the people at dell to reply

so a graphics card can burn out in under 5 months of usage?

[mribrahimali]

i tried gpu-z and that seems to be running fine

[Jasp]

Those are the in effect idle clock speeds, when you launch a game they will clock up to 3d speeds, this could be were the problem lies. As mentioned since you have already tried new drivers, diagnostics etc i'd do a factory reset then take it from their.

[mribrahimali]

by factory reset what do you mean? reformat the laptop?

[Jasp]

Aye a reformat, theirs normally a set of discs or a recovery partition to make life easy and simple. Don't think it will make any difference but worth a shot before ya send it back.

[mribrahimali]

ok ill see how that goes, thanks