ATI Graphics Problem

I've got an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card and everything on my computer seems to be running smooth except when I go to boot Guild Wars.

The initial load screen (the little guild wars box) pops up but before it makes it to the log-in screen I get these black flashes on my screen. About every other flash I can see the hourglass icon but it keeps flickering and I've pretty much got to restart the computer to get out of the repetition. Any answer or advice toward fixing this problem?

450w power supply
I use XP home
512mb ram
and have an AMDxp 2.20g processor

I'm no expert, but 450W isn't very much power.

I had same issue few weeks ago , everything started when I installed the lastest ati/amd driver and I needed to restablish windows 3 times because of the ati driver, it just not working at all , I just went to my old driver and was working again, few days after my graphic card died ..... it was an agp x800 pro 256mb R.I.P.

Now I am with my ooold graphic card nvidia fx5600 (pfff) but at least everything is working fine now, including gw without AA etc, but it works.

Advice: ATI graphic cards zuckz latelly, I wont buy another one, I burned 2 ati cards with GW this year, and my nvidia has like 4 years old and always works.

Check your drivers, make sure they're the very very latest from ATI's website. I wouldn't even bother using the driver CD that came with your new card, they're probably out of date. If you know for sure you're already using the most up-to-date, I'd try uninstalling then reinstalling them.

Are there problems with any other 3D games (if you have any...)?

450W is plenty for that system. 500W would give more overhead but you really don't need much more unless you're running SLI.

It should be enough for that computer. My own comp has an overclocked Athlon 64 3000+ CPU, 2 GB's of DDR400 (four 512 MB sticks), an OC'd GeForce 7900GS, three hard drives and a 350 W Antec power supply, and it hasn't blown up yet. Of course the ATI card could put a lot of load on the PSU's 12V rail, which is usually pretty weak in older power supplies (and current cheap junk).

If you have this problem in other games to you graphics card can suffer from artifacts. But check drivers and all first.

Does this happen only in guildwars? If so, then it might be a driver issue. Like everyone else said, grab some new drivers from ATI's site. If you have similar issues in other games, then it would be safe to assume that your PSU is faulty and needs to be replaced.

get a nivida 8600gt and be done with it

The OP hasn't given us enough info to really judge where the issue really is. Simply blurting out "get a nvidia" doesn't help us resolve the issue any. Also, getting a new video card won't resolve the issue if he has a faulty PSU, which is something he has yet to confirm.

No problem with the power supply. I've got a Raidmax Ninja case that's pretty much brand new, and the power came with it. Pretty much what happened was I went to sleep and woke up my my computer restarted and sitting on the Windows login with a bunch of wavy lines goin through the screen. The new card seems to be working fine except for the 3D error I'm getting and I do have the latest version of DX. I have the latest drivers. I've tried to install them from both Visiontek and from ATI directly and still the same issue. I've also upped the memory to 1gb (I tried doin 2gb but apparently my motherboard only supports 1gb.

I'm still having the same issue. I've learned that I don't have to restart my PC to get it to go back to the desktop but I have to wait about 2 minutes for it to finish the flashing to display the error message. So right now I'm still hoping for something to come along... I mean damn, I missed most of the halloween event but a few minutes of playing on my girlfriends pc. Still any more suggestions would be awesome and thanks for those who've replied so far with constructive help.

Your PSU is now officially the most likely culprit. I vote on a weak +12v. Included case PSUs are often cheap and shoddy and should never be relied on for anything, much less gaming. This is especially true in budget cases like this one.

Run this and let's see what your voltage numbers come out at :

http://www.stvsoft.com/index.php?page=23

I agree with Ctb...99.9% of PSUs that are included in towers are cheap and are highly prone to malfunctioning. The Raidmax Ninja with the PSU that was built into it weighs only 17-18 lbs and thats way too light for a tower + PSU combo, which further proves the PSU is cheap.

Any PSU that weighs under 10 lbs is considered to be of low manufacture quality. The Raidmax Ninja weighs 11-12 lbs without the PSU, which means the PSU weighs 7 lbs at best...not something you want in your system even if it's not a power hungry machine.