Video Card Issues + Suggestions on a Budget

Howdy folks - starting roughly two months ago, I've had an issue when playing Guild Wars where the video driver would fail and recover itself within a 5 second period. It's not common, but I can usually count on seeing it at least once every couple weeks. I've started playing Starcraft II regularly, and since yesterday I can't run either GW or SC2 for more than 5 minutes without a flicker, a BSOD that pops up for less than a second, and then my computer shuts off. I got the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and then I ran a Furmark stress test. I lasted a whole 31 seconds before crashing.

I just installed SpeedFan and it's telling me that my GPU while doing absolutely nothing is at 59 Celsius. I might be mistaken but that sounds really high for just showing me my desktop.

The PC itself is a Dell package back in January 2008, so it's not new by any means nor was it top of the line at the time, but I certainly wasn't expecting this yet. The card is a GeForce 8300GS, and I've got an Intel Core2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz - if there's anything else of relevance, I'd be glad to give more.

So a few questions for those who read the wall of text -
1) Does this sound like it's a video card problem?
2) If so, any suggestions for a budget card? $100 is the most I could readily spend, $150-200 is probably doable but would require some work. I was already running SC2 on the lowest settings, so I'm not worried that I'll be stepping down any.
EDIT: 3) I probably need a new power supply to handle these newer cards too, don't I?

Thanks a lot for any assistance!

I believe that you are actually using integrated graphics. It would be best to check the temperatures while gaming or otherwise stressing your system, but in any case 59C is pretty high for that system while on idle.

There are good options in your budget that would be 10x+ better than what you have now. If you could open up the side of your case and see what your power supply is that would be a good idea.

Whether you need a new PSU or not is unknow until you check what you have, but you will most likely need one.

Your temps are indeed high, you could always download everest ultimate just to double check. Getting a new GPU in any case won't hurt, the 8300GS is a pretty weak card.

I'd still open you case to check the PSU and to check for dust.

You can get a decent GPU for around $100. It won't be top of the line but it will be a huge step up form what you have right now.

Thanks a lot for your help - I ended up getting a new card (Radeon HD 4670) and a new PSU as well - it's only 400W, which is the minimum requirement for this card, but again, I'm on a budget

I'm still having basically the same problem, even with the new card. Temps are much better (idling in the low to mid 40's), and I can watch Youtube or whatever all day if I wanted to, but Guild Wars, SC2, and Portal all crash within 5-10 minutes. They do at least look awesome with the new card, and I've also tried setting the graphics to the bare minimums even with this card.

I have both Vista and XP installed on this PC, so I switched over to XP to try SC2 - same exact problem (and yes, I installed the XP drivers on XP and the Vista drivers on Vista), but I did at least crash back to the desktop once, where it told me that driver amdkmdap had stopped responding. I've checked online for this and it appears to be a common problem for years, but I haven't seen any reliable fixes, including stable drivers or patches - which is why I turn to you again.

Any next ideas?

(Edit: I know this sounds softwarey now, so if anybody wants to move this by all means do so. I just didn't really want to make a second thread around the same basic issue.)

try using Driver Sweeper to remove all traces of your old drivers before installing the latest ones.... www.guru3d.com in the downloads section.

Thanks for the response again - I downloaded that, analyzed and cleaned off everything that said display, and then reinstalled. Still isn't working.

What I don't understand is how I could play SC2 from release night in late July until mid August with no issues, then everything instantly started crashing (of course right when I'm starting to play competitive 1v1's), including my Guild Wars which I've been playing on this system for over 2.5 years without a hitch. I knew SC2 had been overheating some GPU's, so when my card was hot, I thought for sure I knew the issue. Now I'm completely clueless.

Thanks again for the persistent help!

Even though it may appear to be a problem with the video driver, it could actually be a conflict between the video driver and any other driver and/or could be caused by some other hardware problem on you motherboard.
Since you have replaced the video card and installed the latest video driver, the next step would be to make sure that all your other drivers are up to date. Also make sure that Windows itself is up to date - I've seen problems like these come and go as Windows does it's updates.
Make sure that you are not overclocking anything.
It might also help to reset your BIOS as some problems can arise from the BIOS's settings getting corrupted (lightning is great for that).

Any driver updates that I knew how to easily access online I have updated manually (graphics, BIOS, other random things from the Dell driver support). Afterwards, I had Windows search for driver updates for every single thing listed in the Device Manager. The only thing left for Windows Update to give me is IE 8, including optionals.

I have never messed with overclocking at all, so that's not an issue.

I'm still stumped, although my last SC2 test lasted almost 10 minutes into a replay until crashing, so I guess that's a step in the right direction. I really do appreciate all the advice being given here!

EDIT: I just ran a Furmark test for the first time since installing the new card, and it ran for over an hour without a hitch. I then loaded up SC2 and crashed within 5 minutes. What would games be accessing that Furmark isn't?

Don't look at it like that (the last question). I once bought 4, 9600's. All were faulty (bad batch). They passed tests fine, I sent them back. Got charged "testing" fee's. Then I wrote out how to test it, since they weren't testing properly. Got charged testing fees again. They were using 3D mark and crysis. Anyway, long story short - went to a third party, who ran tests that I wanted, got a note from them, threatened to sue the company and got all my money back.

I just wouldn't see benchmark tests as the be all and end all in stability. You can have a slightly unstable CPU that will get you a high bench, and it will crash during a real game.

Have you ran rthdribl? http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/
When I had a fault in my machine, this test was failing, while others weren't.

Also, can you format your machine? You can spend 5 hours getting no where with a computer. You're quicker just to format~

Elektraaa, that program failed basically on the same timeframe as my games do. Since my last post, I've already tried both reinstalling Windows and a full format, along with rolling through different sets of drivers and DirectX versions. Next question - what does that mean is failing? My obvious guess is video, but the crashes look the exact same on this card as they did on my old GeForce, so two totally different cards, manufacturers, drivers, etc.

I know for a fact memory isn't the problem, as I've since taken my memory out of the faulty system and successfully ran both Guild Wars and Starcraft II on a much weaker machine with it - however, I can't test the CPU or even my PCIe card since the motherboard in the test system I have access to does not support either of the two.

I'd love to find a fix that doesn't involve an entire new computer, since the US economy has pretty much decimated my family's income and budget. Again, thanks for any help.

Could be your HDD, bad sectors can cause crashes.

Could be the memory controller on the motherboard (this is likely the reason) Northbridge chips are much more prone to issues than integrated MC solutions. This is one of many reasons they were done away with.

The other option is the CPU.... but in all my years, I've only ever seen 1 defective CPU in regards to "standard" systems. Seen plenty of server CPUs defective as well as botched extreme overclocks. This is least likely.

Try another harddrive if you have access to one as your OS/boot drive. If this fixes it, it was a bad sector on the HDD not showing up as damaged.

I could guess, and really I'd just be guessing. Is there anyway you can take it to a shop? Argue about prices before hand, not after. It's worth asking them to swap out components and test for a fault. Finding faults is easy if you can just swap out components.

overheating is usually due to dust buildup in the fan/heatsink - if your graphics card was overheating due to that maybe your CPU is doing the same?

try checking your cpu temps under load, and make sure the fan is running, I fixed a mates machine a while ago when it was having the same problem and he was sure it wasn't the cpu overheating because 'the fan wasn't even coming on'

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

I have cleaned out my fans and heatsink, but I'm relatively sure overheating is no longer the issue. I logged the temps from a mid-gaming crash a few days ago using Everest Ultimate and got the following:

Motherboard - 35 C
CPU Core 1 - 38 C
CPU Core 2 - 39 C
Aux - 46C (I have no idea what this is referring to)
GPU DispIO - 46 C
GPU MemIO - 42 C

I do have a hard drive laying around, so I'll try putting it in my system and see what happens. If that doesn't fix it, I'll take it to get looked at by somebody with much more experience and resources than myself. The only problem with that is that I don't know the local businesses very well, but I'll send out a PM about that since I'd bet somebody here at least has some experience with them.

Again, thank you all for your time and assistance - these last two weeks have been killing me without my games

Those temps are perfectly within normal operating parameters. I'm leaning towards a bad HDD sector or damaged northbridge.

Another thought would be voltage stability on each rail. That's an easy test as well; use a volt meter to test the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v rails

Or a PSU tester if you don't have either, the PSu tester might be a cheaper option for you ($25 range online).

Try Prime95, and watch the CPU temperatures incase they get too high. If it climbs over 70c then stop the test, if it fails before that then it could be the PSU or something overheating. There's just too much variables to pinpoint the exact problem at the moment.

I would guess it's probably your Motherboard, or possibly the RAM. CPU's are usually built like tanks, they're almost always the last things to fail