doom 3 and far cry graphic problem

[onearmedscissor]

on doom 3, far cry, and one of the tests on 3dmark, i have a weird graphic problem where tons of black little squares flicker all over the screen. sometimes there are more and sometimes there are less. i can't figure out how to fix this. i have directx 9b, radeon 9700 pro 128mb, pentium 4 2.4b ghz, and 512mb rdram. if anyone could tell me how to fix this, that would be great. thanks.

and my doom 3 graphic settings are on medium, with all the advanced turned on except vertical sync and anti aliasing is set to 2x. and 1024x768 resolution. and everything was set to default on 3dmark.

edit: also, i reformatted a while ago, but i had the same problem on far cry and 3d mark before i reformatted.

 

[onearmedscissor]

any help please?

 

[Falls Included]

sounds like a heat problem on the video card.. check to see that the heatsink is secure, and even take it off and put some as5 on it. (doing that got me 5mhz more oc!)

 

[stryder2720]

Your card overclocked at all?

 

[onearmedscissor]

my computer is a dell and is almost exactly the same as when i got it. the only thing i did was add 256mb more ram and a sound card.

here are some screenshots:

http://img70.exs.cx/img70/5066/shot00001.png
http://img70.exs.cx/img70/3348/shot00002.png
http://img70.exs.cx/img70/9904/shot00003.png

they don't look as annoying in the screenshots, because in the game i notice it more because they are constantly flickering, and a lot of the flickering ones didn't got caught in the screenshots.

 

[4keatimj]

Definately a heat problem. What sort of cooling do you have? You may need to put some more fans in there to keep it cool.

 

[onearmedscissor]

i don't even know. i just have the cooling that came with the system, a dell dimension 8250 from november 2002.

 

[kronchev]

stock dells love to have crappy cooling, get a few really quiet fans to get some airflow in your case. read the casemod forum for help

 

[onearmedscissor]

should i bother getting anything now? i plan on getting a new computer in december or so.

 

[zandor]

Maybe a slot fan or two? You can add them w/o hacking up the case.
Dells are designed to be quiet, not nocessarily cool. Thier custom cooling solutions seem to do fine for the CPU & disks, but they really don't give the vid card much airflow, at least not in the ones I've taken apart.