Display Becoming Corrupt (artifact) [Media Centre]

jozi

I just installed Media Centre on an old-ish pc (spec below) and while messing around trough the menu's, playing music etc the interface became corrupt, maybe it was artifact. Text was appearing everywhere or disappearing from the list, buttons at the top left disapearing as well.

I can try gt a screen shot if you need to see what i mean.

Spec:
athlon 2500+ mobile (over clocked to 2.2ghz - prime stable for hrs)
Asus a7n8x-e dlx mobo
1gig of ram
geforce 4 ti4200 gfx card
using svideo to scart on the tv
thats the main components

Could it be down to the gfx card being old?

Jozi

DonkeyStyle \o/

Could be overheating... are you overclocking the gfx card?
Is the case well ventilated?

Could try leaving the case open for a few mins and see if it still happens or try removing the CPU o/c and see if that helps.
Changing to newer/older gfx drivers could be worth a shot too.

jozi

I ran prime for hours and it never went over 50C for the cpu and the case temp was under 30C (via mbm5)

I installed old drivers because its such an old card, will try newer ones maybe tomorrow.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Is the fan on the gfx card looking alright? (or is it passively cooled?)
I'm really leaning towards a heating problem if everything works for a while, then out of nowhere goes garbled.
Unless there's some specific thing you're doing to trigger it, like it only happens when you go to a certain menu that uses a part of directx/the driver that the rest of the program doesn't.

You could always try under-clocking the card, just for testing purposes.

jozi

What do i use for underclocking a nvidia card? ati tool? riva-something?

SouperComputer

give it a whirl:

http://freestone-group.com/video-card-stability-test.htm

Sounds like the ram might be getting hot on the card.