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Screen flicker has me baffled :confused:

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sp00L

Member
Joined
Oct 24, 2003
Location
Buffalo, NY
Screen flicker has me baffled

I've noticed over the past week that the bottom of my screen has a faint horizontal line that bounces up and down about 2 inches from the bottom of the screen. Almost like a wave. The odd thing is I've moved my fans around, unplugged the n/b fan from the mobo and put it into the psu, changed the agp voltage from 1.5 to 1.6 to 1.7, moved the monitor physically, and plugged the monitor into a different wall outlet.

The only thing new in my rig is the mobo. I swapped monitors with my other rig and noticed that niether monitor flickered like this one on my rig. This monitor had no problems with the ti4200 on the amd box and the cheapo 17in. monitor had no problems on my rig with the 9800xt.

I've reseated the vid card a dozen times, my temps are 61 C at idle. I've played with the monitor settings and even enabled vsync. I've tried different resolutions.

No luck :(, it still, occasionally gets that bouncing line that moves up and down about an inch from the bottom. It'll go away with a reboot, sometimes a deguass will do the trick. Then sure enough it returns. Sometimes it won't happen for hours, sometimes it'll even happen in the middle of Wolf ET where the top and bottom edges of the screen compress slightly then return to normal with that damn bouncing horizontal line at the bottom. Forgot to mention the line or wave or whatever is horizontal.

I removed the volt mods from my 9800XT months ago and even re-installed the stock cooler a few weeks back. I'm truly baffled by this one.

If it's the vid card, great, I buy a 6800GT. If it's the monitor, great, I pick up another 20 in. But not so great, I don't know which one it is.

Any ideas or suggestions?
 
It looks like the monitor is playing a bad trick with you. For how long did you test it with Ti 4200 for errors? Did you play games and stuff on Ti 4200 and that monitor? What kind of monitor you have? And did you try moving the center of the screen down?
 
It's an NEC MultiSync FE991SB. I run at 85 Hz for the refresh rate. I played games with it on the ti4200 no problems for a few hours. Haven't tried moving the center of the screen down, i'll try it.
 
What resolution are you running at? If your monitor can't handle the refresh rate/resolution combo, it might do some crazy things. Though i'm not 100% sure.
 
Cerberus2k7 said:
What resolution are you running at? If your monitor can't handle the refresh rate/resolution combo, it might do some crazy things. Though i'm not 100% sure.

Almost 99% of the time the monitor would just switch to "power saving" mode if it doesn't support user selected resolution/refresh rate. :)


sp00L said:
It's an NEC MultiSync FE991SB. I run at 85 Hz for the refresh rate. I played games with it on the ti4200 no problems for a few hours. Haven't tried moving the center of the screen down, i'll try it.

So the ti4200 was in the other rig and it worked?

Try this

AMD rig + 9800XT + 19" NEC
Main rig + Ti 4200 + 19" NEC

and see where it fails. This should narrow it down to the "troublemaker" :).
 
You read my mind. I have the the ti4200+intel rig+nec going right now.

With 9800xt+intel rig+nec I got horrible flickering minutes ago that I couldn't stop. So far with the ti4200 in the main rig, at 1280x1024, no flickering. We'll see.

I must have fooxred something up between the volt mods and the amd heatsink on the XT :(
 
You sure you didin't overclock your monitor? :D

[/sarcasm]

A friend of mine asked me how to overclock his monitor to make games faster... so I thought I'd cheer ya up ;).

Well, so far it looks like the card is starting to fail? If so you have a good excuse to buy yourself nVidia FX6800 GT you wanted...
 
Last edited:
After 1 day of having the ti4200+intel rig+nec, I've managed to recreate the flicker problem. So, this rules out the 9800XT as the culprit.

I poked around in the case moving wires, unplugged fans to see if I was getting interference. Nothing helped. Then I did a deguass and the bouning line went away but I don't know if it will come back.....crap, I dropped $350 on this monitor last year.

And it almost seems wierd. But maybe I need to dust out the inside of the monitor, which is something I DON'T want to do.
 
Problem solved. I called NEC as this thing carries a 3 year warranty. They even crossed shipped me a refurbed one provided I give them a credit card number which they won't charge until 21 days after I received the new one. Oh well, at least I can reuse the box the new one came in :)
 
Nope. The flickering started on my Asus board which is 875 and at the time I had a 9800XT. When I got the 6800U the problem remained so I figured it was the monitor. It's been 3 days now with the new monitor and no problems.
 
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