andyw said:
It's about 6 months old and its a 17" Samsung 172X tft.
Possibilities:
1) Overheated GPU. If the card has some kind of GPU temperature
monitoring function, see whether the GPU is in the "danger
zone". When it comes to putting heat sinks on video cards,
some companies do a horrible job of installation. It could
be that the heatsink is no longer making reliable contact
with the GPU, or the fan has stopped. A good sign, in a
way, is if the heat sink gets hot, because that means the
heat is being transferred to the heatsink. The trick then,
is to have effective air cooling to finish the job.
On an ATI graphics card I've got, I noticed one component
on the card gets pretty hot while gaming, so I have an
80mm fan blowing onto the face of the card. My fan is mounted
on a horizontal arm that is fastened to a PCI slot screw hole.
2) A graphics card takes high voltages, like +12V or +5V from
your power supply, and converts those voltages to 2.5/1.8/1.5
and so on. If, for any reason, those switching converters
are not able to provide the needed power to the chip, that
could cause all manner of failure modes. Run a finger over
the components, and see if anything is burning hot.
If the power supply is not up to the task of driving your
system, the BIOS hardware monitor or Motherboard Monitor or
equivalent in Windows, can be used to examine the voltages.
If the voltages are low by 5% to 10%, then that is something
to watch. Also, see if the voltages change, when you change
the acceleration slider in Windows.
3) Either the GPU or a graphics memory chip could be failing.
But the symptoms in that case would likely be more "colorful",
with big blotchy squares of odd colors and the like. I doubt
a failure would just result in the edges of rectangular
regions on the screen, being blurry. Being a failure though,
I suppose anything is possible.
I would guess (1) is your problem. You might check Google and
see if your brand/model number of card have claims of similar
problems, because sometimes bad batches of video cards make
their way to market.
I expect you've already tried several versions of drivers.
You should keep a few versions around, as driver
updates are frequent, and new problems can be introduced
with each "improvement". For example, some video card drivers
that have improved the frame rate for some cards, resulted
in the cards running a lot hotter, and I would revert to
the most recent "sane" driver version instead. If the problem
only occurs with one driver version, the solution is simple.
Paul
