Hello.

I noticed weird colorings and crashes with a few computer games with my
four years old MSI R4870-T2D512 OC Radeon 4870 video card (512 MB; PCIe).

Symptoms:
-Weird colorings (e.g., purple color weirdness in Half-Life 2's Lost
Coast (HL2:LC) and redness and blackness in RO2:HoS).
-Black blank screen -- video signal lost (see
http://i.imgur.com/gmDd6.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/C2SdO.jpg what is
shown even with its weird colorings but not on my monitor due to video
signal losses) and fan stop spinning for a second and resume.
Computer/Windows still responds based on pings, ssh, telnet, cmd.exe,
etc. Once, it went back to 4-bit VGA with its ati2dvag display driver
stopped responding message to reboot. Other times, I can sometimes
recover back to Windows if I kill processes, open up cmd.exe fullscreen,
etc.
-Video card and its fan air feel almost hot (not burning) in both idle
and heavy usage.

Up to 81C/177.8F degrees when gaming with HL2:LC's stress video test and
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad free weekend.

65C/149F degrees with a manual full 100% fan (it still works) control to
blow out heat for about ten minutes in a 25C/77F degrees room.

Note: Used Google search engine form's calculator to convert temperatures.

Does this sound like my video card is broken or dying? 2D stuff seems to
work fine. I did have to fix my computer's hard lock up problems when
playing videos (including Flash) by downgrading back to v8.10 driver in
my old, updated Windows XP Pro. SP3. You can read
http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt for my detailed
primary computer specifications.

Thank you in advance.
--
"For an ant to have wings would be his (her) undoing." --Iranian
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A song is/was playing on this computer: The Damn Jammage - She Drowned