I've got a machine with a Radeon 9700 pro card. When stresstesting the card using the rendering program "rthdribl", after about an hour there appears static noise on the screen, in vertical bands. The noise remains till I stop the program, then disappears.

Questions:

1) What is generating the noise? GPU, memory, CPU, other?
2) Why is the noise generated? Overheated GPU/memory, failing PSU, m/b error, or other?

I suspect it has something to do with overheating. Is this card known for needing a lot of cooling, in addition to the fan on the card itself?


Knut Arne Vedaa

The video card's chipset is most likely overheating due to dust built up on its fan and/or heatsink, its fan is not running at design speed, its heatsink is not secure, its heatsink's thermal compound is not doing its job, or the computer's case fans are unable to keep the internal temperature adequately cool.

It's also possible that the video card is slightly loose in its slot.