Are these symptoms of overheating?

[michiel1978]

I have a new Saphire Radeon 9250 in a brand new Compaq Presario. The PC has 1 cpu fan (AMD Sempron 3000+) and 1 80mm case fan that usually rotates on a low frequency (the PC is very quiet). After an hour my screen starts to show purple lines, and sometimes letters on my screen (in dialog boxes etc) turn partially purple:





Is that typical for an overheating GPU or should I look elsewhere for a solution? If it's the GPU, can I prevent this with ATITool? I haven't yet tried ATITool, because I want to know first if it's really my videocard.

Thanks!!

Edit:
Pictures offline

[stordoff]

they are artifacts , possibley overheating

[michiel1978]

Ok, thanks. So l should use ATITool to lower the clock frequency then? Is there any rule of thumb for the settings of processor and memory, or can I just lower both by 30 or whatever?

[stordoff]

i recommend better cooling , rather than under clocking

[michiel1978]

Well, for me performance isn't really important, I just bought a simple card to get a decent resolution/refresh, but I don't play games. Also, fitting another fan would mean drilling holes in the chassis, since there's not available slot for an extra fan.

I have now had no artifacts for the whole day, and both CPU and Mem are on -40 from the default. I'll try to improve on that, but for me it's fine.

However, in the future, I will look for a videocard that's either actively cooled (but it must still be very quiet) or I'll invest in better passive cooling (like Zalman).

[Muad'Dib]

it looks like defective RAM.

[Clock Master]

Yes that's definetly memory issue's there. I had a ATI 9800XT do the same thing from high temps all the time(70+ Celcius). You should see if the warranty is sill good. If not you should get some ram sinks, cause if this happens after an hour or so and it's ok from the start that means the memory is getting too hot and has electro migration from running so hot all the time. Get copper ram sinks with thermal epoxy, and if your lucky you wont have any problems.

[Clock Master]

Oh by the way, if you decide to put the ram sinks on use a mix of 50% thermal epoxy and 50% thermal paste and you should still be able to remove your heatsinks if you wish to. Just mix the stuff up real good. Sorry for the double post guys, I forgot to mention this before.