Display corruption on G450.

[Variant]

I have a machine with a G450 dual head card in it. A few weeks back the machine had a fan go bad and was overheating. Replaced the fan, but ever since the display has been exhibiting weird issues.

Icons and text will randomly "corrupt". You can generally clear the corruption by clicking on the text, or minimizing/restoring. In addition, random black boxes will show up in various applications (AIM, etc) or in the system tray.

Latest drivers are installed (OS is WinXP), the motherboard is a VIA chipset (KT133 I believe) and I'm not running in dual head mode.

Thinking the problems might be related to heat, I tried to underclock the card using mgatweak... however this locks the machine up. Perhaps MGATweak doesn't support the G450 :-)

Is my card permanently damaged? Oh yes, I've also tried disabling busmastering per a post I came across here.

Easy enough to replace the card and see, but thought maybe someone has run across this before and can offer some quick tips.

[schmosef]

Sounds like a video memory corruption problem.

What was the fan that went bad cooling?

[SitFlyer]

The problem is definitely heat.
I have a G450 that I don't use any more because of this issue. Never could keep the card consistently cool enough to not corrupt the display.

[Mcollector]

Have you tried reseating the G450 in its slot, and/or adding a case fan? What about a slot cooler card placed next to the G450 if your case airflow is bad? Do you have a lot of flat ribbon cables in your case, blocking airflow? Try round cables (pricier than ribbon cables, though).

If these don't help the problem, try the card in another system (or try this first). If it still does it, the G450 is probably toast, or on its way to becoming toast.

If the card works w/o problems in another system, your heat problem could have damaged other components in your original system, like maybe the PSU. But it does sound like video memory, or maybe the GPU.