radeon hd 4850 freeze

[bluegravyphase9]

Hey there, having a bit of a problem with my graphics card. radeon hd 4850.

It's been working fine since I built my pc about 1/2 years ago, but recently it keeps playing up.
I've never had problems playing at max settings and was working fine up until a couple of days ago.

Whenever I launch a game, be it mass effect 2 or frets on fire, it lasts a few seconds then freezes my pc and makes the screen glitch all over with various colours. I can't really explain what it looks like very well without a picture, unfortunately I can't print screen when it's frozen. Sometimes it crashes back to the desktop, other times I have to hard reboot.

I re-installed all the drivers and flashed the bios (as usually that sorts any problem out as my motherboard (abit ab9 pro) seems to be part of the problem) but i'm all out of ideas.

I'm going to try giving it a clean this weekend, but besides that any ideas? Or is it more likely it's time to replace it?

Thanks

[bluegravyphase9]

Ok, a small update.

I cleaned my pc and graphics card. There was a metric ton of dust in there but managed to get it all out with some compressed air. Tried to see if that did the job, but it's still causing the same error. I'm thinking I might just bite the bullet and get a new graphics card as there's not much else I can see to do to it.

Checked the temperature before it crashed this time, and it hadn't changed from the temp it was at when nothing was running (45 degrees) so I'm pretty stumped for ideas.

If anyone has any inkling of something to try let me know, otherwise I think it's going straight in the bin for a new card

[Queelis]

You may take a picture of the screen while it's frozen with a camera, but from the sound of it it looks like the graphics is botched - artifacts are mainly the result of a faulty graphics card.

[bluegravyphase9]

Hi, thanks for responding.

I haven't really had the patience (or camera) to take a picture of what it looks like, but i've scoured the internet and found some pictures that look almost identical to my problem. I can't post them as I need to have 5 posts before I can according to the rules, but from the look of things it sounds like my card's pretty much dead. Oh well, time to upgrade it then I guess!

[TheWizard]

Have you been using ATi overdrive? I used to have a Sapphire 4850 and apart from being loud as it was a single slot card it was also notorious for casuing BSODs, random restarts but I never had glitched screen until I started using the overdrive feature.

[bluegravyphase9]

Hi

Nope, I've always had it set up as default. I only went into the overdrive part after it started glitching to check the temperature, and haven't changed anything on there