PowerColor X850XT Platinum w/checkerboard pattern in some games

Frodo301

I just built a system for a friend and have run into an unusual problem. At first I thought it may be related to heat/ram problems but now I'm not so sure. On the games Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Juiced on start up of game he is getting white checker board patterns. The patterns seem to follow a pattern of what is on the screen at that moment. For example in Splinter Cell when you first start the game on the beach if you look to the left there is a boulder, the checker patterns will fill only the boulder. If you face straight ahead it will fill certain points of the beach. The same is true with Juiced. It occurs with the cars mostly. But the kicker is that when I run HL2 or Doom 3 both of which should tax the card heavily I get no unusual patterns. I can play HL2 or Doom3 for hours and no checkerboard patterns. Understand this happens on start up of game, you can turn the machine off overnight, boot up and begin game with the patterns on screen so this leads me to believe it's not a heat issue. The fact that HL2 and Doom3 runs perfect leads me to believe that it's not an issue with the card. Neither Juiced or Splinter Cell appear to be taxing games, I run both on a 9600xt pro just fine. So I'm left wondering, video driver, Nvidia motherboard driver issue? The specs are:

Power Color x850xt platinum, AMD 64 3500+ w/Venice core, stock AMD cooler, Epox EP-9NPA+ULTRA mb, 2 gigs of OCZ DDR 400 plat ram, Maxtor 300 gig sata hd, Liteon DVD burner, Liteon dvd rom, Creative Audigy 2 zs, Sparkle 560w PS, 3 fans running 2850-3200 rpm, Aspire X-cruiser case. All recent drivers for vid card and Nvidia Nforce and everything is running at stock. Temps are 32c idle for processor and 35c under load. Machine was burned in w/ prime 95 for 48 hours no errors and memtest 86 48 hours no errors. Sorry for the long post. I appreaciate any and all help.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Could be video configuration. Try turning of Catalyst AI maybe? Or changing drivers if that doesn't help?

Just fiddle with the options a bit

b1naryb0y

I would suspect faulty pipelines.

I have the same issues with my x800 pro modded to x800 xt pe. Most games run fine, but I get a checkerboard pattern when using the torch in Doom 3.

When I go back to 12 pipelines, no problem.

H3X4D3C1M4L

His card isn't modded though leaving me to believe it might be heat related or possibly PSU but a 560 watt PSU, name brand or no, is still beefy.

daedal

Does the pattern appear in 3DMark?
You can tweak fan settings using ATITool. Set the fan speed higher, I believe stock in only set to 18%, and see if you still encounter the problem. My X850XT runs very poorly/with artifacts on stock fan speeds.. o0