OK hi, my system is a 6 month old out-of-the-box compac P4-1.8MHz, 254MB, ASUS P4-B Moth.B, w/radeon 7500-64MB(TV out)card.

My graphics card keeps "freezing" at random usually during games or after a few hours of use, the screen blocks and gets little-out-of-place colorful squares everywhere
(sort of in vertcal lines like in the matrix).

It only loses resolution but all the programs keep running just fine, so you can still see enough through all the mess to close the system and restart it.

Overheating?
Crappy card?
Need more ram?
Driver?
Power supply?

DEVELOPMENTS:

I. SO FAR, I have installed a new driver (from the ATI homepage --> wxp-w2k-radeon-6-13-10-6200-efg & control-panel-6-13-10-3041-efg) that are supposed to fix some bugs on some systems, it installed great, no fuzz but.

NOTHING! keeps freezing at random.

II. I also was cleaning the inside of the tower (w/canned air) and I noticed that the video card has NO FAN.

III. The registered TEMPERATURE from the sensors never goes over 50C./120f(P4-processor), but the VideoCard does feel quite toasty on both the ram chips and the processor (cooling fins), normal???

Now what shoud I try?
Anyone had simmilar problems w/ATI's?
Any other suggestions?

Thanx in advance.

hi stmpford

i've a radeon 64mb ddr card that i just bought on ebay for the dual monitor support,
it has a cooler on the chipset and seems fine.

i had a hercules kyro 64mb card in before that was excellent, but for about 4 months had similiar problems to what you describe. after changing memory and trying everything i could think off i eneded up unplugging my hard drive cooler and that fixed the problem.

not sure whether the cooler was faulty or if the power supply was the problem, i make up my own machines with bits and pieces i scrounge from work and have three fans running as well as second hard drive and usual cd/rw etc. the tower case is the same as another one i have and i changed the power supply in the other to a heavy duty one after i blew the old.

anyway my conclusion is that my problem was probably the power supply.

we had 20 new dell pc's in work last year and out of them 11 of the power supply's went in the first couple of months, was a faulty batch of PSU. so can happen.

if you bought the pc new you must be under warranty ?. myself i'd try adding a cooler to the card and replacing the power supply with heavy duty one 350 or 450 watt supply. but first call should be your warranty.

hope helps mo

Hi Stimpford.

Try running your computer with the cover off.

If it runs for a longer period before freezing, then it may be an overheating problem.

Also, if the sound card is located in the slot next to the video card, you could try to move it farther away even if you have to trade slots with something else in your system. Sometimes having the sound card close to the AGP slot causes a disagreement with the video card.

Take care,

Linda