PCTech Forums

Hi there.

I purchased a Radeon 4850 graphics card just over 2 years ago and now it seem to be playing up.


A few weeks ago, when gaming, my screen would flicker and the game would hang for a few seconds (sometimes up to a minute), and then the desktop would be displaying saying "a driver error has occurred, it has now been fixed" or something similar. Note that I had not changed the driver.

I then installed the newest driver version, and now my screen flickers for a second and a chessboard graphical bug comes up, just before a blue screen and the computer restarts itself.

I thought to myself "Hmm, ok. Seems like a driver issue", so I downgraded the driver - no fix. Then I completely uninstalled the driver and used the auto-detect Windows drivers - no fix.

Also, the graphical errors sometimes happen even before Windows loads, during POST.

Is this my graphics card? Or could it be something else? I'm going to test RAM later today.

Thanks in advance!

it does sadly sound like the card is on its way out. Typically when you start seeing artifacts and such it points to a gpu heat problem and everything you said points straight to heat other than glitching at post. If it glitches at post from a cold startup, then that pretty much rules out heat only leaving hardware failure.

Do test your ram though, ram can cause crazy problems and not all of them are predictable. I dont know that ram would glitch graphics, specifically at post but i cant say its impossible either.

Thanks for your reply!

I have actually fixed it. I took the card apart and a thick layer of dust was blocking the heat sink air vents, so it was overheating VERY badly, and has been for a while. Hopefully it lasts a while after the thrashing that it has taken!

good deal