Hi,

some days ago, I noticed some short black horizontally lines appearing whilst playing an old game.

They appear occasionally on the screen.

I never had this problem before.

I have also encountered some instability at full CPU load.

How can I determine the faulty part (CPU,Graphics,RAM,Board)?

I do not have spare parts to exchange.

AMD 1800XP; W2k; ATIRadeon9000 64MB; 256MB DDR400; AOPEN nforce2;

80GBMaxtor; 450W Enermaxx; Underclocked to FSB125

Old monitor? Old video card, overheating? Update the video drivers? Use Ultimate Boot CD 3.4 to test your RAM and harddrive. I'd suggest also copying all the files from your system to another PC or drive at least, incase this issue gets worse.

oh boy, thats not a fun thing to happen.

the graphics card is overheating, and theres no way around it. i had similar problems with a PCI Genoa Phantom, even buying a chipset cooler didn't help any. best thing to do is get a new card. even a used card would work, but the one your using will just start to die if it keeps up.

how well is your case ventilated?

also, is it AGP or PCI?

I have a AGP Sapphire Radeon9000VIVO passive cooled

AMD XP1800+ with Arctic Copper TC2

Enermax PSU (with 2 coolers)

no additional coolers

The funny thing is when I run memorytests like testmem, the system hangs after a short heat up time.

Get a can of air and blow any dust out of your PC. You can try to buy a bottle of CAIG's DeoxIT and clean the connections to RAM modules and the video card. Take out and re-seat your RAM at the very least.

However, from what you have told us.... I'd suspect the memory first. The vid card is probably not the culprit since you only see the lines in one specific game.

On a side note, win2k is generally not the best OS to run games with.....