Color issue (Direct3D?)

[PrOLifIC_onE]

ISSUE: My icons and some pictures and text are distorted. Sometimes they change back to normal after I hover the mouse over them and other times (or some specific icons) will just stay distorted all the time. I just installed windows on this, with a new motherboard. I am currently using the onboard video until my PCIe card gets here later this week. I don't know if its a hardware issue (onboard video), a driver issue or something more at the OS level (or something else)...

CPU-Z even gives me an error saying "An error occurred when opening the driver. CPU-Z will launch but all information won't be available". It only lists some CPU info. No motherboard or Ram information...

What I did so far:
I DLed and installed all the latest drivers from the MB website. I temporarily changed to 16-bit quality and even changed the monitor refresh rates...

I ran DXDIAG (9.0c is installed) and it shows the video as having 256MB even tho it is only set to share 64mb of the 1GB. On boot-up it shows that only 64mb is shared. I ran tests within DXDIAG and directdraw worked fine. DIRECT3d on the other hand only passed 1 of the 3 tests. Is there any other tests I can do to test it further?

Many of the icons will end up distorted (desktop, quick launch, startup icons...etc) Even some of the browser buttons will sometimes change. Windows used to start up and look 100% normal then as time went on, the icons would start getting distorted. The icons look like they were reverting back to some old color quality, while the quality is set at 32-bit...

Plans:
I will follow up with some screenshots to show you (yes it takes screenshots of exactly what I am seeing... this is what is making me think it is not a hardware issue.

I will toss my 7900GT back in there soon probably and test that out but it is currently in my main PC.

Here is my setup:
MB: Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-RH
Onboard GeForce 6100 Video
754 AMD Processor (3000+, engineering sample)
160GB WD SATA
160GB Maxtor SATA
Hauppauge 250MCE capture card
802.11g wireless pci card
1GB DDR PC3200
FSP 400watt PSU

The motherboard and PSU are the only new components... the rest were working fine with another MB with a FX5200 AGP card...

[PrOLifIC_onE]

Well I installed the 7900gt and I installed the latest nvidia drivers. It was working like a charm at first. It passed all the DXDIAG (directx) test with no probs.

I switched from CPU-Z version 1.38 down to 1.33 and it detects the MB and DDR fine now...

Then right when I opened up firefox, the firefox buttons changed colors until I went over them with the mouse. It is not near as bad as before (yet) but the problem is still here somewhat... I was going to repost and say that it must have been a prob with the onboard GPU or some 'communication' problem between the MB and ram regarding the shared memory but I guess thats not it...

Although I just checked before ending this post and everything seems normal again... WTF?!?

[Hitman]

off the top of my head it sounds like you might have a bad Motherboard.

[PrOLifIC_onE]

Well I don't know. The 7900GT definitely had less problems but it still had some none-the-less. It is most notable when trying to use the wizard to setup SAGETV. The first couple screens look normal then the video is all screwed up. I think sagetv uses some kind of java, but I did all my java updates as well.. The sagetv errors looked exactly the same regardless of which GPU was in use.

I am back to using the onboard GPU for now. What's weird is that it seems to correct itself everytime I reinstall the GeForce drivers ... then it eventually reverts back to having the problems...

I also ran a MEMTEST, resulting in no errors...

I really don't have anyway to test the MB further, as this is the only 754 CPU that I have... I guess the only thing left is throwing all the other parts back onto the other MB that I have and see how it does...

[Quakindude]

Sounds to me like a borked mobo chipset driver install or a bad Windows install. Try all the software options before exploring the replacement of your hardware.

You're having more issues than I had when I experienced something similar to this. My picture thumbnails were all distorted. Didn't matter what format I viewed them in, filmstrip or thumbnails, but they looked like an old color TV on the fritz. After much troubleshooting, I finally reinstalled Windows on a whim and it was fixed. Funny thing was, it was a legit copy of windows that I had installed just a week ago. I don't know to this day what was wrong, but I know formatting and re-installing the OS fixed it.

If you chose to go this route, just make sure you download and burn all the current hardware drivers to a disk. Makes the install much easier.

[PrOLifIC_onE]

I did try a new windows install, but the funny thing was that something weird happened the second time. It went straight to asking for the admin pw and didnt go to the screen requesting usernames. This is a legit key that I have permission to use through my work (Volume license a.k.a. Corporate edition). But the only disk I have is an old SP1 install, then I have to install SP2 after that. I have used this disk for all my other installs and have never had this issue. BUT I will take your advise and I will reinstall this and do a complete format instead of the 'quick' format during install.

It is worth one more shot. I have all the DLed new drivers on another partition so I am all set with those. If this don't work then the MB gets sent back to Newegg...

[Quakindude]

Originally Posted by PrOLifIC_onE

I did try a new windows install, but the funny thing was that something weird happened the second time. It went straight to asking for the admin pw and didnt go to the screen requesting usernames. This is a legit key that I have permission to use through my work (Volume license a.k.a. Corporate edition). But the only disk I have is an old SP1 install, then I have to install SP2 after that. I have used this disk for all my other installs and have never had this issue. BUT I will take your advise and I will reinstall this and do a complete format instead of the 'quick' format during install.

It is worth one more shot. I have all the DLed new drivers on another partition so I am all set with those. If this don't work then the MB gets sent back to Newegg...

You may want to see if there are updated drivers for your hardware prior to installing them. Also, instead of using Gigabyte's mobo drivers, try getting them directly from nVidia.

The drivers for the 410 chipset on nVidia's website are for Windows MCE only. Are you running Windows MCE?

If not, it looks like Gigabyte has fairly new WinXP drivers from nVidia on their website.

[PrOLifIC_onE]

Yeah, the drivers I now have are from the gigabyte site.

[PrOLifIC_onE]

ok. It still did not work. It started messing up right away in sp1 before any major updates (but after the chipset/vga install) Im reinstalling everything in the other 754 MB that I have. I am sick of this.

[PrOLifIC_onE]

Well, I tested this thing out one driver at a time. So far it seems the wireless card was the problem. After I installed the card, then the Utility for it, the PC had the problem on reboot. I uninstalled the driver and removed the utility, rebooted and VOILA back to normal graphics....

So, my guess is that the utility is overwriting some windows file(s) that it shouldn't but I am going to reinstall the rest of the hardware/drivers slowly and see if anything else happens...