Pixelated screen followed by blue screen and restart
 

Ok, my friend is having a bit of a problem with his pc. A few months ago he was getting a similar issue, his screen was pixelated and went black after a while. I bought him a new graphics card (4870), psu (460w tagan) and 2gb more ram. However, just recently he has started to get that problem back. When he boots up it is ok for a few mins and then it starts to go all pixelated and he gets the blue screen of death and then it continues to restart. The 4870 has been fine thus far and has a good cooler on it, it might have came loose? Could faulty RAM cause this problem?

I would say the memory of the VGA card. If the problem is just on desktop and can run games fine could be Powerplay problem it could setting frequencies and voltages at witch VGA is unstable.

Straight from AMD's site:

It's true that Tagan are good PSU's but it's being stressed out.

If it's not in 3D mode, I'd doubt the PSU is lacking - I do agree it's not enough. I had a 4870 and know the system will draw upwards of 450 under heavy gaming loads.

Bad RAM can and has been the cause of some video issues in the past (though rare). The video BIOS is copied to RAM on boot for preformance resons. It's called "shadowing". If the RAM is bad, it can certainly lead to a video failure.

I have a friend running two HD4830s and a Q6700 off a Tagan 500W PSU. I am not sure the PSU is the culprit here.

Have you run MemTest to find out? Test your hardware to narrow it down. All we can do is guess.

Will take over a 3850 at the weekend and try putting that in. Will also try memtest.

Could there be a fault with the motherboard which has messed with the card?

I'm using a corsair hx520 and a 4870 512mb with no problems.

What's in the system? Would be important to get all that first.

generic ASUS G33 mobo
6550 2.33ghz not overclocked
4gb ram (2gb kingston with heatspreaders + 2gb generic no heatspreaders)
320gb hdd
4870 512mb not overclocked with accelero cooler

Try taking out the generic RAM and see how she behaves.

If that's not it, try running the generic RAM by itself.

If that's not it, use a hammer.

There's no kill like overkill... :D

Anything worth killing is worth overkilling, LOL.

Oh, one other mention of video card overheating above. Should run GPUz at startup and monitor the temps. That could be the another possibility.

Hell yes. :toast:

This problem can be pretty much anything in the system...mobo, PSU, GPU, RAM...