Wierd artifacting issue...

So I came home after the LAN and hopped on Cobalt to surf and start some torrents before going to sleep and noticed that areas of my desktop were artifacting pretty badly. I've had it happen before with my 5970s quite often and it was a driver issue that was fixed fairly quickly so I wasn't too worried as I hadn't overclocked my 5870 at all and temps were well within acceptable range.

Well, fast forward a little while and the artifacting gets worse. I figure driver problem again so I load up something 3D so the GPU clocks will ramp up to alleviate the artifacting and the artifacts disappear. 10 minutes later same story, and again and again and again...

I was now worried my 5870 was going bad and so I sent off a request to HIS for technical support/RMA but decided to pull the card before the problem worsened. Easiest card to replace it with was one of my GTX 480s so I swapped the cards and loaded into Windows to uninstall/restart and install nVidia drivers. When I got into Windows however, the artifacts were there on my nVidia card as well!

This seemed highly unlikely that my 5870 was the cause of the problem as it was no longer in the system, but I didn't know what. First rule of troubleshooting, I set everything back to stock clocks and loaded it up and same problem. There is even artifacting on the BIOS screen!

After installing the nVidia drivers and restarting a final time it seems to have passed for the time being but it's bugging the crap out of me to find out what the hell it was. I managed to snap some pics with my iPhone while I was booting up during the troubleshooting. Anybody have some ideas? What worries me is that it's my HP LP2465 monitor, while it's the cheapest problem to fix, I'd rather it not bite the dust.


http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/3831/img0003gv.jpg

http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/3259/img0002hqj.jpg

http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/4251/img0001iw.jpg

http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/3281/img0006ut.jpg

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/3118/img0005gg.jpg
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Failure is just success rounded down.

The last time I had artifacts on a video card it was a 9700 Pro and there was a bad solder joint on the power connector.
You had to tie the floppy connector up in a place that would put pressure on the joint to make contact. I didn't want to resolder it.

I know you screwed with your PSU a lot... might swap connectors

If swapping the video card didn't fix it, it almost has to be the monitor or cable. I will confess that I've never seen artifacting that bad without a severely overheated video card or a video card with failing memory... or a visibly damaged screen.

If you take a screenshot in windows or in a game, do the artifacts show up, or only if you take a 'photo'? Does the monitor's OSD ever artifact?

monitor cable
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power supply

flux capacitor
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Well, I can confirm it is not the power supply. Powering the video card with my Enermax 600w while the rest of the system ran on the Enermax DXX 1000w it showed the same symptoms. I actually did this last night but forgot to type it in the OP.

As far as screenshotting the artifacts, no it only shows up on pictures, not screenshots. Depending on the type of artifacts that I've seen they don't always show up in screenshots but this doesn't tell me anything since I don't know what that means for the type of artifacting.

I wiggled the cable last night while playing with it but it didn't seem to change the image while playing with it. I'm really quite at a loss for what this could be... That said, it hasn't appeared since the final restart after installing nVidia drivers so I'm hoping it's some fucked up ATI Catalyst 10.4 driver corruption or something.
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Failure is just success rounded down.

Run it to your TV, see if it artifacts on your TV

LightningCrash wrote: Run it to your TV, see if it artifacts on your TV

Nikola wrote:
I was SERIOUSLY worked last night after having not slept the night before because I have missed including half the shit I did to troubleshoot. While artifacting on my HP LP2465 via DVI-D, it did NOT artifact on my 46" LCD via DVI->HDMI for audio-over-HDMI.

Have you tried giving me your computer?
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