VisionTek 5850 artifacting on BC2

[phatphoeater]

I just build the following rig at the end of February:

i7 860 stock settings
biostar T series 1156 mobo
2x2gb g. skill 1333 stock settings
WD 640gb black
HP212+ cpu cooler
visiontek 5850 1gb stock settings
corsair 650 psu

Everything was running well until about 1week ago, I noted lots of pale yellow random shapes flickering inside buildings. 2 days ago the artifacting got significantly worse but i could still make out objects inside buildings. I also now get artifacting in some of the details outside of buildings. The leaves of a shrub will have random shapes flickering but the rock next to it will be fine. A google search yielded nothing aside from general assumptions that the hardware was failing.

I have all my settings on stock. GPU temps look to be about 70c in CCC. I cranked the gpu fan up. I upgraded to the 10.4 beta drivers soon after release. Yesterday I uninstalled those and installed the official 10.4 drivers. I then tried the 10.3 drivers. I tried putting graphics on low. Still the same problem persists. I don't have any other games installed to see how it performs. The only other game I own is BF2.

I contacted visiontek and they want me to ship the card to them for testing but want $10 for return shipping. they don't offer a replacement card while i wait for them to figure it out. before being PC-less for however long it takes them, i wanted to turn to the knowledge here. any thoughts?

 

[blanketyblank]

Considering it's getting worse it sounds like a hardware problem to me.
The not offering a replacement card is normal, but them wanting $10 return shipping sucks unless I'm understanding that wrong. Usually for RMAs you have to pay the cost to ship the card to them, and then they will pay to ship back to you unless there is a violation of the warranty (i.e. card is burnt, smashed, or still working depends on the language). If the card truly is defective will they refund that or something? Check the language in the warranty and see if it mentions anything about that.

 

[dopee123]

70C idle, or fully loaded? If you idle at 70C then I wouldn't be surprised your card is dying.

 

[marmasatt]

Sounds like a hardware issue to me. I had to RMA my Visiontek 5850 a month ago. The card would rev up, but the memory chips were faulty I believe. You should speak w/ actual ATI, they offered me an RMA directly to them when I had issues. They were great.