Serious Problem!

I've got a Dell Inspiron 9100, and am having serious gaming problems. Games run but with graphical problems. Resulting in them looking as bad as the shot below. The system is more than capable of running the games, such as Pro Evo 4 and 5, and Gun, with a 256mb Graphics card, 1gig of ram, windows XP Pro, 3.4Ghz P4. The motherboard and GPU were replaced last week and no improvement has been seen. I have reinstalled the games numerous times, changed drivers from the normal Dell one's to Omega drivers, and even installed XP. Dell are claiming there is not a problem with the GPU as it was just replaced, but I'm not so sure. Can anyone shed any light on this problem. Thanks.

 

it looks broken

 

new graphic card...
this happened to my desktop computer, where your brown shapes where black on my screen. Got a new ati graphic card and all is fixed. Also, noted that the company that built my computer had the exhaust fans backward causing overheating.

 

Looks to me that there is some problem either with the GPU memory or GPU itself. Now it really bothers me that the mainboard and the gpu was changed? Have you tried directx 9.0c reinstallation? Does it happen both in directx and opengl games? Does it happen immediately? How about dxdiag 3d test? Can you see the cube without problems?

Cheers,

 

Sorry i'm pretty knowledgeable when it comes to comps but not GPUs, sorry, but I'll try as best as I can. When playing pro evo the game loads fine, but often the menu's can be distorted. Sometimes not. But the graphics almost always are. Sometimes worse than others. Oddly the dxdiag 3d test was fine. Now downloading 9c reinstalation so i'll let you know about that. Could you give me an example of an opengl game please and i'll let you know about that too. Thanks, Liam

 

Doom 3 is an OpenGL game - just download the Demo, see how that works.

You have serious artifacting, I'm thinking that the GPU's memory is flawed.

 

Ok, thanks. Think i've got the full game somewhere so i'l hava look and get back to you

 

it could be part of an overheating problem. i have seen it in desktop GPU's alot. also, if a person overclocks a desktop gpu too much, itll look like that. the golden rule i have learned from desktops is this..

if it looks like spikes shooting out from the vertices - its the GPU

if it looks like the fill of the textures is going crazy colors, its the memory.

in your case, i'll toss it to either another bad GPU or some sort of overheating.

 

I've not overclocked the gpu at all so it's not that, could be overheating but this problem is a new one, which emerged when my motherboard initially broke and has persisted since it has been replaced.It could be due to fan problems but when running I8kfanGUI it says my core temp is 61-62 degrees, which I don't believe is particularly hot but i may be wrong

 

The above graphical problems were from Pro Evo 4, here's a shot from pro evo 5. The problems are less but still there. Oddly the players are fine, but the power bars are the bottom are missing, and the team scores incorrect too. Any ideas? Now downloading the Doom demo, couldn't find the disc so i'l post when I get some shots of that running

 

Oh, I reinstalled direct x and no luck with that. Just waiting on Doom now. Is Gun an opengl game coz I have that available. Same with football manager 2006.

 

I think something is wrong with the GPU card. Must be. Unfortunately.

I wish you luck,

 

Ok well thanks. Dell have been no hope whatsoever but at least now I know what's up most likely and can complain until I get a new card. Thanks alot for your help, i'll post again when Doom has finished and I've tested it. If Gun is also an opengl game I have been having problems with that too. Thanks again for all the help, Liam

 

ur problem is probably this

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115363,00.asp

id check with dell to see if they are offering recalls on faulty machines. could also try things like playing witht the anistropic settings or antialiasing as these features sometimes wreaked havoc on my older desktop.


......give tech support people a break. i worked tech support for "Big Name Here" (think i signed some contract saying i wouldnt discredit company or some crap) and first of all its like this. we worked 12 hours for 3 days a week and all day we would get rude callers or callers with brains in their butts.

first of all, most times when you call your "big name" you get directed to some subcontractors chatline. they hire on regular people with varying degrees of computer knowledge and "train" them which of course there is really too much to computers to get it all in training and they expect people to "soak" it up as they go. now the ones that actually know a thing or 2 about computers usually end up quitting due to the retardedness of it all. so new hires are always popping up to replace the lost numbers.

not only that.....a lot of the fixes i use for myself i wasnt allowed to tell to the callers because it wasnt "big name" supported information. ridiculous rules like you arent allowed to troubleshoot spyware which really isnt that hard to get under control. just "big name" doesnt want to be responsible.

 

Hi Skixis,

Very interesting information. I must say I'm very unhappy to hear all that. Somehow I suspected that, but it is a really very bad way of dealing with the customers. Both to the (competent) tech support people and the buyer. Customer support? With a exception of some eloquent and knowledgeable people, most of my attempts with the above mentioned ended up in the almost tragicomedy. Usually I know much more about something than they do. If they do, they don't want to share it (maybe for some reason you have mentioned), and if they finally help you, you just realize forums already covered that or it didn't solve your problem 100%. Bad outcome one way or another.
I guess I'm one of those people who prefer e-banking instead of bank if you know what I mean. I simply don't feel that people who's job is to help me with something will help me in a way I expect. I usually end up dissapointed.
Maybe that is why I like this forum so much?

Cheers,

 

hehe, yeah.......i worked there for a month and it was crazy. oh, usually when you are being put on a brief "hold" it means they are running to their supervisor which USUALLY but not always is very computer savvy and they ask him for advice. so imagine 8 people in line swamping one guy with questions and you are required to break hold after 2-4 mins so person knows you still there. so you have to get out of line to break hold. you are back in line again irritated caller and irritated techie. was nice for me tho. often id help my little cluster near me and help the tech's to take the load off my sup.

i took my job seriously tho. to me i was there to fix computers. but it ended up that i did customer service and had to listen to hours of nonsense, like one woman telling me IN DETAIL her son's porn surfing habits and how she thinks he has corrupted her windows xp. OH OR my favorite named elmer, LOL. he sounded like that creepy old pediphile off family guy and kept saying GD WINDOWS XP! but i liked elmer he was a lot of fun. lot of the time i was tempted to write down all the numbers of the nice callers and toubleshoot all night. but it is illegal. lol. some privacy rule so i decided it best not to dabble.

but whenever i got a caller id usually spend as long as it took to fix a problem and make sure they didnt have to call back again. ive always liked helping people. unless they were very rude to me in which case id pass the phone over to my supervisor.

i felt so bad for this one woman......she had called in 8 times and spent hours on the phone that day and nobody knew how to help her. one person got rid of her with a trick called gwscan.........and another had her do a windows repair. woman was practically in despair pleading for me to fix it. i fixed it in 10 minutes........was something simple really. she installed a new video card and couldnt get it to work so i had her manually disable the onboard video and she already had the drivers installed for the card she was trying to use so POOF! it worked. she was so happy ) think we made both our days. really the key if you bother with techies is be nice and if you get one person that didnt help keep calling back until you do. if one says they cant help more than likely you will find one that will. unless you are out of warranty or some such....OH YA and it stinked they put web filters on everything so if i didnt know the answer to something i couldnt even google it up. but i learned a trick ^ ^. click on the cache pages and it would load up.

 

Thanks, I hada read from the PCWorld website. It doesn't really tell me much though apart from they say they've fixed it. I would give tech support a break if they were remotely competent. It can take up to a week to get an email response, when Dell say they should reply in 24hours. I've been known to have to send up to 4 emails before I get a response. The people that do call are foreign. Not a problem if they can talk english fluently but they can't. They don't listen to the problem they assume what it is an often give ridiculous instructions to solve problems. Like I had multiply problems at one point and was told to reinstall windows. All well and good apart from the fact my DVD drive not reading discs was one of the problems! They refuse to aknowledge the fact that legally i'm entitled to a refund as it took them 4 months to repair the system, in which time they even had the bloody thing for 3 weeks and sent it back in the same state! Then a technician came, didn't even fix all the problems and the main one he was meant to is still persisting. So you can see my frustration! What's worse is I don't have a number to contact the people I need because whenever they ring it always comes up with 'unknown' or '0123456789'. The worst thing is that i've never been rude, never swore or even raised my voice. So it's not like i'm a difficult customer, just one with a problem I want fixed! It's so frustrating!!!

 

Just loaded up the doom3 demo, same problem as you can see below. So guessing it's not the direct x, must just be a GPU problem. Annoying as the bloody thing was replaced

 

Man, I really feel sorry for you. I hope you will finally get it solved.

Cheers,

 

Could this be due to some kind of conflict with screen resolutions? I run windows on 1680 x 1050, an the games currently dont work. I managed to get top-spin to work when I set the game resolution to 1280 x 960. It doesn't make any sense to me that the games won't run on any higher resolution, especially as they used to. I'm guessing there is still a problem with the card but this is an odd twist in the tale

 

make sure fast writes is disabled. when you installed the omega drivers there is a selection box which asks if you wants fast writes and i hope you checked no. when screen gets distorted try alt+tabbing out and in again see if it clears up anything.

 

Fast write was off. And unfortunately no amount of alt-tabbing is helping. Thanks for trying tho. The resolution thing with top-spin seems a one off coz no other game is affected when the resolution is lowered or raised, they just have distorted gfx. Still no word from Dell. This is following the guy telling me it wasn't broken when it clearly is. And that was now 3 days ago. Oh the joy

 

it looks to me like there is a serious virus on your PC, I'd recommend doing a thorough virus scan of your HDD.

 

It is not a virus Lil Mayz!

Cheers,

 

Spoke to dell, they're claiming nothing's wrong as the display isn't distorted other than playing games. And as the part is new they're even more reluctant to admit fault. If anyone's got any ideas on what I sould say to them that'd be great coz im stuck between a rock and a hard place at the mo!

 

I wouldnt go with an ATI at all. Nividia just runs games much better.

 

Hey, just a bit of an update. Got a call from Dell a week ago, they denied everything and hung up. They then left a message saying they'd call back the next day, which never happened. Or any day this week. Then on saturday night the whole system went down. I'd installed a windows update and restarted the system and it simply never came back on. Now when I attempt to power it up the battery light comes on and three other LEDs and these then flash off after a second or two. There isn't a power problem as the battery has full power and the AC Adapter is working fine, so I've not got the foggiest what happened! What's worse is Dell aren't replying to my mails and ignoring my calls!

 

Try and do a Dell chat. Then call and ask to speak to a supervisor. I will not speak to normal tech support. Explain the situation to the supervisor and tell them you need this fixed or you are going to return it for a FULL refund.

This usually gets some response.

 

Finally got Dell to admit to a problem. Getting the whole thing replaced, and a new warranty etc etc. Still not exactly impressed but at least this way I'll get a new system that'l come to greater value than my initial one and can just sell it and get shot of Dell. I really would't recommend them to anyone! This has been a major problem for me but it's not even the first one with them! So if you're gonna buy Dell, beware! lol

 

Not easy, but you finally did it.

Cheers,