Every few weeks my GTX 460 starts exhibiting very strange artifacts/graphical distortions.
It looks like texture stretching on the screen in random directions or just garbled textures. So weird misshapen polygons or stretched existed textures just start to form. Anyway after a while the entire game freezes and I have to either hard reboot or I occasionally get an error message saying "nvidia kernel mode drivers have stopped responding and has recovered".
On some games I see artifacts (white spots in random places), and sometimes they just crash on launch.
Anyway long story short this happens every few weeks on multiple games (SC2, Crysis, FEAR3, Skyrim, far cry 2; or even videos downloaded from youtube playing in vlc player or winamp).
When it happens I take out my graphics card; blow out all the dust in it (sometimes it's a lot; but today it was hardly any). I reseat the graphics card and then everything seems to be fine for a few weeks. And then the problem happens again.
Whenever this happens, GPU temperatures are fine (40-50 degrees cent) and the GPU fan also seems to be running fine.
My case has 2 fans, 1 in the back and 1 on the side; and there's the standard 1 cpu fan and 1 gpu fan (came with the respective parts).
The side fine seems to pull a lot of dust though and is located right next to the GPU. Right now I opened the case so the side fan is off.
I bought the card about a year ago.
Is it
1) Dying from faulty components/onboard ram etc ?
2) Excessive dust causing some kind of weird problem ?
3) Seating problem with loose contacts maybe ?
I'm confused; I'm thinking of buying a gtx 560 but to me buying a gpu after just 1 year of use seems excessive since almost all the games I play run fine on my monitor (which supports a max of 1440x900). Also it would be a complete waste if the problem is elsewhere.
I live in eastern India (Kolkata) so dust is fairly standard; nothing exceptional but obviously not like unpolluted areas.
more specs
intel i5 2500k, p67 pro asus m/b, 4GB ram, SSD 60 GB drive, windows 7, 1TB 7200 rpm sata hdd, latest nvidia drivers
It looks like texture stretching on the screen in random directions or just garbled textures. So weird misshapen polygons or stretched existed textures just start to form. Anyway after a while the entire game freezes and I have to either hard reboot or I occasionally get an error message saying "nvidia kernel mode drivers have stopped responding and has recovered".
On some games I see artifacts (white spots in random places), and sometimes they just crash on launch.
Anyway long story short this happens every few weeks on multiple games (SC2, Crysis, FEAR3, Skyrim, far cry 2; or even videos downloaded from youtube playing in vlc player or winamp).
When it happens I take out my graphics card; blow out all the dust in it (sometimes it's a lot; but today it was hardly any). I reseat the graphics card and then everything seems to be fine for a few weeks. And then the problem happens again.
Whenever this happens, GPU temperatures are fine (40-50 degrees cent) and the GPU fan also seems to be running fine.
My case has 2 fans, 1 in the back and 1 on the side; and there's the standard 1 cpu fan and 1 gpu fan (came with the respective parts).
The side fine seems to pull a lot of dust though and is located right next to the GPU. Right now I opened the case so the side fan is off.
I bought the card about a year ago.
Is it
1) Dying from faulty components/onboard ram etc ?
2) Excessive dust causing some kind of weird problem ?
3) Seating problem with loose contacts maybe ?
I'm confused; I'm thinking of buying a gtx 560 but to me buying a gpu after just 1 year of use seems excessive since almost all the games I play run fine on my monitor (which supports a max of 1440x900). Also it would be a complete waste if the problem is elsewhere.
I live in eastern India (Kolkata) so dust is fairly standard; nothing exceptional but obviously not like unpolluted areas.
more specs
intel i5 2500k, p67 pro asus m/b, 4GB ram, SSD 60 GB drive, windows 7, 1TB 7200 rpm sata hdd, latest nvidia drivers
Last edited:
