Graphical errors with video card

I have been having some issues with my graphics card. Part of this post was originally posted in the gaming forum, but with no response. That being said, I have an ATI Radeon 1300x series card on top of the issues with the gameplay below, my desktop keeps changing from the picture to black and white stripes. It doesn't matter what the picture is either. I have tried rebooting and it does the same thing after a little while. I assume there is some sort of graphics mismatch.

Gamplay graphics problem
My Sims2 game is crashing. It will load up to the the neighborhood choices screen but as soon as you try to enter for gameplay it crashes to blue screen and there is an error message that flashes. It reads something like, the graphics adapter has encountered an internal error, the application will now terminate. I updated my driver and it is still happening. I am not sure what is going on. I got this card in Sept. because the built in Nivida 6200 was not nearly enough to play. Everything worked fine until I installed the Sims 2 Bon Voyage and then there were all sorts of graphical errors, game lag and crashing. So I unistalled everything, updated my driver and then reinstalled everything except for Bon Voyage. But now it won't play at all. My system specs are as follows.

HP Pavillion AMD Athalon 64xDual, Core Processor 3800+, 1.80GHz, 1.0 GB of RAM. DirectX 9.0c, ATI Radeon 1300x series w/512 RAM. updated driver to 7.11.

Sims Games installed Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open For Business, Pets, Seasons, Family Stuff and Glamor Stuff.

Any help would be appreciated
eliluca06

 

Download and install ATI Tray Tools (here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/ATI_Tray_Tools_d4569.html) It has monitoring for your video card temps. Run your PC for a bit and post the temps. Personally, I think it sounds like the card has been damaged somehow, or maybe your PSU is old and not strong enough anymore.... anyway, post the temps and we'll go from there

 

Thank you for replying. I downloaded the tray tools. but i am not sure where to find the temps. Where are they at?

 

I found the section where i would need to check the boxes to see the temps but they are greyed out. So i must have done something wrong.

 

Here's how I do it: right click on the icon by the clock in the system tray; select Hardware > Monitoring Graphs; click the Add button; then put check marks next to whatever you want to monitor (GPU temp; CPU temp; environment temp; etc). Under Motherboard sources you can check Temp 1, 2, 3, and pick custom colors (instead of white) for each by right clicking in the white rectangle for the color palette....

 

Yes, I saw all of those options but they are greyed out and not selectable. Under Motherboard monitoring it says it is unsupported and there are no choices. Now I am able to look at external plug ins and choose HDD Temperature. but that is it. I am unable to choose CPU, GPU, or Environment temp. So I am not sure what is going on there. Also as of this morning, all of the icons for this are grey, they were color last night. And part of my toolbar has turned black. I think the card is just dying and you were probably right when you said it was damaged. I am going to get a replacement, but thank you for your help anyway.
eliluca06