artifacts, dying video card?

Here's the scoop,
In the past couple weeks I've been having artifacts show up on my screens, in video playback and just in general use of the computer(finder, entourage, etc. all have the issue). The artifact is usually a couple lines of random coloured or black pixels. In video playback they bounce around the video stream often constantly and in regular app windows they will just be lines across the window that usually go away when I resize the window or just do something in the app. When I try to do a screen cap of any windows with the issue it doesn't show up in the screen cap.
AS You can see by this example(pic on right is from camera phone)

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So I figure I have a bad video card right?
Well not quite, today I rendered out a big clip(hdv timeline nested in sd prores hq timeline, exported to prores hq, then compressed quickly 1 pass for dvd). I noticed that in the rendered video I am seeing similar artifacts at one point in the video. It appears in my prores file and obviously my m4v dvd file as it was encoded from the prores. As far as my knowledge goes, FCP and compressor don't use the video card at all for rendering, especially for an output file, that should be done by the cpu only. So maybe I don't have a bad video card, but maybe i do and this rendered artifact is just a seperate issue? I'm not too sure, maybe one of you will have some insight into it.

Here is an image of that artifact:

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I'm on a quad core 2.66 mac pro with 5gb ram 500gb system drive, 2 750gb drives in software raid 0(editing off of this) and 1 320gb storage drive, x1900xt 512mb video card(running dell 24" and 19" 720p lcd tv).
Running the latest final cut studio 2 w/ updates, osx 10.4.11, and Quicktime 7.3.1.

I've set up a work order to have diagnostics done on my tower out by our local mac store/repair center, they're backlogged until next week though, this is a full time machine.

I found out an old editor left a 150gb project on my system drive so I removed that(I only had 10 gigs free because of it) and I've noticed few artifacts since, also my machine stopped randomly locking up(I forgot to mention this in the first post), at least for now. I'm still gonna take it in for diagnostics.

hi,

if the artifacts are in your rendered video, you might get your RAM checked. I had a similar problem a couple of years ago, where artifacts turned up in different places of the rendered material. Rerendering produced similar artifacts in other places. Turned out it was a bad Ram... Also I had several crashes when the mac was doing heavy rendering/moving files around.

good luck finding the cause,
thomas

Hmm, We have got a second quad core recently and bought 8gb of ram to put in it when it came. I took the 1gb module that shipped with the new quad core out and put it into the mac pro I use bumping it up to 5gb. Could that 1gb module be causing the issue?

I really don't think it's RAM and it may not be your video card...

I call these "torn quicktimes". When I upgraded my machine to an 8-Core Intel from a Dual 2.5 PPC, I got a new ATTO Ultra320 SCSI Controller card to control my RAID. It turns out that the Intel machine didn't like the Ultra320 SCSI RAID and the RAID was "tearing" the quicktimes (artifacts / dropouts / lines / whatever the heck you wanna call 'em). I replaced the RAID with a Caldigit S2VR SATA RAID - problem gone.

Then again, I did have an issue of "tearing" with a faulty Kona LHe cable port (wiggled the cable slightly - lines cleared up). Kona swapped it out as a Warranty Replacement overnight. You should get your video card Support to walk you through diagnostics and narrow it down. I hope your video card is under warranty.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.