Problem with 6600GT

[temp0]

I've just brought a Sparkle SP-AG43GDH GeForce 6600GT, put it in my machine and loaded up 3DMark03. For the first game test, Wings of Fury the picture is fine, but the next two, Battle of Proxycon and Troll's Lair there appears columns of black dots. Then in the game test Mother Nature its fine again. I tired disabling fast writes as I read that was a solution to some peoples problems but the dots still are there.

I also tried playing far cry. It was fine up till a point where a light was swinging and changing the image on the walls and floor around it. This lead me to believe that the problem might have something to do with the pipelines on the card that control this kind of stuff, but I don't know too much about that. The second picture below shows how the dots only appear where the light was flickering.

FarCry0000.jpg
FarCry0001.jpg

I tried forcing software mode for the vertex shaders in 3dmark to see if it would make any difference but no luck....

Anyway, my question is is this problem enough to return it under warranty? I've tried playing Mafia and Quake3 and everything is fine, and up to that point in Far Cry there were no problems.

My specs are:

Athlon 2400+ XP
Sparkle GeForce 6600GT
Soltek SL-75FRN2 Mobo
3XSeagate HD
DVD writer
300W PSU
WinXP SP1 (also tired SP2)

I tried unplugging all but one HD and DVD writer aswell as all pci cards thinking is might be a power issue but still no luck. Also the power cable connecting to the card is not connected to any other device.

Also if anyone has any ideas of what could fix it it'll be a great help.

 

[temp0]

Forgot to mention, I've tried 71.2 drivers aswell as the ones that come on the cd, 66.83 I think.

 

[NightElf84]

Have you overclocked your card? What kind of temperatures (GPU and ambient on load) do you get?

 

[temp0]

No, it was like this fresh out of the box, I tried underclocking to about half of what the gpu and memory clocks were but the dots didn't change.

 

[temp0]

I'm not sure if I can check temperature. Theres nothing under display-settings-advanced-GeForce 6600GT about temperature. But the dots don't get worse with time or are better when I first start up 3d mark.

Also I was messing around with doom3 and when I turn turn shadows off in the advanced options the dots disappear. I tried changing the other settings, putting them on high detail but its only when I turn shadows on that the problem comes back.

 

[montag451]

contact manufacturer and see what they suggest