SOLVED Help! Screen went all crazy during overclock

Please someone help me. I was in the process of performing the 3 step overclock, finished step 2 and had stable core freq, core voltages and memory speeds. Went to adjust the CPU clock multiplier back up (in steps), had a BSOD occur and now when windows loads, the screen has wiggly lines and weird colors throughout. Reloaded video drivers and nothing. XP splash screen looks perfect though. What is goin on here... ahhhhhhhhhhh!

wiggley lines? like how? got a picture?

did you fully power down the computer, AND the monitor remove the power off the wall if you have to, then boot back up again, and then turn on the monitor last.

Heres the picture of what I see now... (pretty freaky considering the background is actually plain black).



The above image is with all optimized DEFAULTS loaded back into the bios.

oh, that is bad. good thing you can see something.
chances are Good that this is comming specifically from your GPU card. hmm icons are all clean still, that is major clue, because Icons and pointers are often rendered by the gpu card as a seperate function of the card

what does it look like in 3D mode? via some 3d bench test or game?

ohh quick test , which will probably show nothing, you do a "screen grab" of the desktop using the Print screen option then pasting the copy of the screen into a program.
then if you look at the picture (on some other computer or your cell) and it is OK, but the video card shows it as ruined, then you know one thing it isnt the OS with a screwed up background picture display.

Think thats busted can you put it in another system so it runs at stick clocks?

Psycogeec said:

oh, that is bad. good thing you can see something.
chances are Good that this is comming specifically from your GPU card. hmm icons are all clean still, that is major clue, because Icons and pointers are often rendered by the gpu card as a seperate function of the card

what does it look like in 3D mode? via some 3d bench test or game?

ohh quick test , which will probably show nothing, you do a "screen grab" of the desktop using the Print screen option then pasting the copy of the screen into a program.
then if you look at the picture (on some other computer or your cell) and it is OK, but the video card shows it as ruined, then you know one thing it isnt the OS with a screwed up background picture display.

Click to expand...

Well I cut and pasted the desktop into Word and open the file on my laptop and there are NO lines.

Also, I started Windows in safe mode and the screen was fine.

Any more comments ???

so the picture of the desktop shows the software is displaying correct, but it fails between there and the monitor

and in safe mode, your in Vga compatability mode , and everything is fine.

So now i really believe that the Video card is screwing up.
and it is screwed up ASsoonAS you get into the OS, so it isnt like you can fire up some software to cool it.

do you have any overclock of the video card hardware? that possibly starts up with the OS? or say a bios flashed overclock.

hmm what to do next, because when the driver is not loaded (safe mode) and we really wish this thing was still good.
i guess next would be clearing out all the drivers with driver sweeper, rebooting into the os and seeing that it is in Vga compatable again (even when in normal boot mode)
then reinstalling some drivers, like say Back One driver set from the ones you were using, just in case some new drivers were assisting in causing a problem like this.
.

Any chance your video card has a extra power connector thats not hooked up?
I would remove the card and wipe the connectors with alcohol and dry and reinstall the card.
Can you try the card in another computer?

K. Something very very strange is happening but as I am troubleshooting, I have one interim question...

Is there anyway that OCing the main board via the bios (gigabyte x58) can affect the video card (High end 3D graphics card) ?

NOTE: I have not done anything to the graphics card directly including graphics bios changes. Nothing. Only the MOBO.

have you tested Video card in a different slot on the motherboard?
is the link width still 16 in cpuZ

overclocking can push a video card differentally, if the pci buss itself is raised, it can push the video card to work a bit harder, i have never fried one doding that, even after some major buss increases.
Fur mark and other hard testing of the GPU can push it over the edge, but chances are good that with either of those and you NEVER overclocked the gpu itself that the video card would have problems eventually anyways, these things just finalised it.

you have reset any overclocking back to bios defaults , since it happened?
and mabey wrote down where you are at in your settings before clearing back to default?

you have tested the ram on the motherboard and it passes memtest86 fully, and is not showing any problems in the testing or operation of the system?
Have you pushed the video cards FAN to maximum, to get it as cool as possible to see if that helps
have you analised the temps that the video card sits in ,in your case, to figure that it was or wasnt getting adequite cooling?

have you replaced the drivers, in the possibility that hard disk corruption from overclock settings, corrupted the software drivers.
.

OK. Now I am really (really, really) confused. The problem stopped. Screen just went fine again.

Any guesses now ? If was really the video card, would it repair itself like this ?

If it is bad vRAM, is it possible for me to test the vRAM to see ?

What about the possibility of DVI corruption ? Is that hardware or a data transmission issue ?

I found these links...
http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/artifacts.html
http://www.playtool.com/pages/dvitrouble/dvitrouble.html

the cooling of the ram on the video cards itself , different on different video cards and referance and non referacne types, can have the video ram hotter than it should be
increasing the fan speed or lowering case temps can help.

when it is as bad as what you have shown here, a full re-initilisation of the card (turning the power off) is minimum to reset the card. then increasing the cooling.