Does heat cause corruption or bad memory

[chand]

I'm havin some corruption issues with my video card. i was wondering if its a sign of heat or maybe memory. everything was fine until last week and now when i turn on my pc its all corrupted. its ok to work, but forget it if i turn a game on.

[Cygnus_X_1]

easiest way to start to diagnose would be to take the side of the case off to promote airflow. make sure you check the fan on the GPU (if it has one) is spinning, and to clear out any dust bunnies. from there, with the power off, reseat your hardware (vid card, memory, check the thermal paste & hestsink on the CPU) and genreal hardware maintanance to rule out the basics. once you have confimed all is in order on the hardware side, grab the latest drivers for your hardware (chipset, vid card, etc) if all that checks out, then you may be looking at a impending hardware failure (GPU, MEM, CPU, motherboard) easiest way to check those is if you have access to another machine you can sway out the parts one by one to try to replicat the problem on the other machine and you have found the culprit.

good luck the fun is just beginning.....

[BigLoo]

Both will actually. I'd do what Cygnus said, but if the video is corrupt right away, even when you first post, it could be a damaged core due to heat or something else, or bad memory. If it's just fine, then degrades, it could be heat.

[Quasar]

Is your problem looking anything like this?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y112/blazer-glory/screenshot.jpg