computer freezes screen a mass of coloured squares

[alvino]

Running a pentium lll 500 on win98se on a AOPEN MX6B/EZ motherboard with 256 memory. Installed Gainward GF4 TI 4200 Golden Sample for gaming ,all seemed fine and well until lately .When gaming the computer freezes the screen goes a mass of small coloured squares and a restart is a must. IF i reduce the memory clock frequency of the grahics card from 512 to 390 or below the problem is cured , however saying that the MCF always ran at 512 up to this point.
I do overclock my processer to 550 !! swapped memory , reduced /increased latancy , used turbo setting , used factory settings etc found that the only way to stablise things was by doing the above.
Computer never crashes when NOT running games except when on the internet when the same problem occurs .
Is my GF4 card cooked ? can my motherboard not handle this card? is my processor fried ? any ideas !!!!!

[Bovon]

Originally posted by alvino

Is my GF4 card cooked ? can my motherboard not handle this card? is my processor fried ? any ideas !!!!!

Hi, I am not a gamer, nor an overclocker...having done just a little of each hardly qualifies me to attempt an answer to your problem..but since no one else has tried, I will say just a couple of observations.

1) many video cards fail under system overclocking setups. This was not a problem so much until the computers frequencies became so high.. i.e., back in the SS7 days (2 ~ 4 years ago) the max (normal-stock) frequency of a machine was around 500 to 600 MHz, overclocking would go up to maybe 800 MHz under any normal O/C setup. The better motherboards that had AGP and PCI dividers would work pretty well.

Today, its a whole different ball game, and getting worse. RAM timing is critical, PCI and AGP frequencies can get out of specs very quickly. Some video cards handle this better than others.

In your case, I would suspect the cards onboard ram being out of specs or simply bad ram..it does happen.

I seriously doubt this has anything to do with a "fried processor".. a motherboard that is not handling the frequencies well, and even the video card that is not coping with the frequencies may be the problem.

Frequency of the system used to not be a real problem..but as frequencies increase, so do the glitches..even circuit traces on the boards must be exact..not just close (that stopped at about 500 MHz) exact and tested. It is becoming extremely difficult to overclock anything today..because of the circuit limitations of the design. Kinda like trying to get CNN television (audio) news on your desk radio FM dial, not gonna happen.