Garbled and Flickering Images on ALL 3D gfx games. HELP!!

My first post so please bear with me.
(Note: this is also in the Hardware forum, as I was unsure where to put it.)

::The Problem::

My nVidia GeForce (64 mb) 420 MX w/TVout
(my PC is a Dell Dimension 8200, about 3 yrs old)

Warcraft 3, Rise of Nations, and any other game along those lines that I try has serious issues with my graphics card. It flickers and randomly changes plots of land to black, ect.
For instance, in Warcraft 3, the peons have black squares flickering around them, and the trees will randomly look like they are Undead trees for a few flickers.
Also, a big fact thats important is that when the computers been on for 5 minutes, this problem doesn't occur. However, when it's been on for 3 hours, it happens instantly even if you restart it.


::What I've Done::

I updated the driver for the card, my DirectX to 9.0b, and troubleshooted it completely in Windows. I reinstalled the drivers, updated bios of my PC and called the Dell tech support line. The Dell guy and I worked for a while, adjusting settings and the hardware acceleration, to no avail. He told me that it was probably not a hardware problem, just a problem with a setting somewhere, but he had no idea what I have set wrong.

::History::
In October, the moniter that came with the computer caught on fire (no joke). So I went to Best Buy and got a Sony Flatscreen LCD moniter, which is very sweet (its model is SDM-HS73, and it tends to get hot when I don't have a fan running on it).

In January, I got a bootscreen through BootXP and had it on for about 2 weeks before this SAME graphics problem occured. Then I uninstalled the bootscreen and it went away.

Now, in April, it has resurfaced ever since I updated my nVidia drivers to 56.26 (or something like that). Then I updated to 56.72 and the problem didn't go away. And no I did not reinstall my bootscreen.

Thanks for any help you may have!

 

Is your computer in a generally hot room? Try opening up the case and blowing a fan inside of it...the video card could be overheating, and it might not even have a fan on it, and dell cases have poor ventilation to begin with, so your computer may end up going on fire next! (not really, but it does get very hot in there) Try giving the inside of the case some air, see if it helps.

 

Yes my computer is in a hot room. I will try that.


However, dont stop posting replies! That may not be it

 

try a scandisk and defrag. the tree-switching problem could be caused by a cross-linked file.

 

If the cooling the inside does not work, try lowering harware acceleration.
Right click on desktop>properties>settings tab>advanced button>troubleshoot tab> slide the bar to about halfway. Exit and restart computer. Run any games and see if you have the same issue.

 

This problem went away for a while, but for some reason the required 56.12 nVidia driver update (that came with the Sasser protection on Windows Update) has got it messed up again.

It is the same problem, except it doesn't go away when its cooled now.


Help!

 

And I have tried lowering the Hardware acceleration, to no avail.

 

Flickering problems is seen mostly on new graphic cards, and with my experience on game painkiller main problem of flickering is DriectX 9 and multisampling if you can close multisampling in game using directX only like painkiller these multycolor flickering boxes dissapears but If you can not like Deus Ex: Invisible War or Age of Mythology you have to force it down manually or use a tweaking program if I can find the solution I will write here you can also searh in guru3d.com forum

 

It sounds like the problem started when you updated the driver which I don't understand how sasser could infect you through a video driver. Have you tried rolling back the video driver?