Hey everyone,

So I built my first system in November last year and had no problems getting it up and running. It's run pretty much flawlessly since November, with everything I've thrown at it, games, apps etc. However, recently I've started encountering graphic problems while playing more demanding games. Over the last 2-3 weeks I've been getting atikmdag driver recovery errors while playing certain games (e.g. Mass Effect, Test Drive: Unlimited). Sometimes this would crash the game, crash the system, or recover fine.

I did some research and saw it as a common problem with Vista, so I decided to create a partition and install XP. That went fine, and so I tried playing those games from that OS and within 5 minutes the display would basically fail so that the system would still be running (sound included sometimes), but the display would go black and search for analog or digital inputs before going to standby. I then tried installing the latest Omega drivers to my XP partition and encountered the same problem.

I'm assuming at this point that it's not a driver problem. My first guess is my graphics card is failing, however if that were the case I'd expect a more drastic impact, rather than being able to play a majority of games but not the most recent. That's just my guess of how it should behaviour though, so I may be completely off.

Any suggestions for what might be wrong would be awesome to hear. This is driving me crazy and although I know Mass Effect is buggy, I would at least like to be able to play my other games. So yeah, thanks for any help you might be able to give.


System specs:

CPU: Intel E2160 Allendale 1.8Ghz (normally OC'ed at 3.0, but kept it at stock for last few weeks)
MB: GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L
RAM: 4GB OCZ Reaper HPC Edition PC2-6400 DDR2 (read that too much memory may cause atikmdag problems, kept at 2GB for last few weeks (slight improvement, but not fixed))
PSU: Thermaltake W0106RU 700W
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1900 GT 256MB DDR2
OS: Vista x64 and Windows XP MCE