New
#1
Trying to determine a video (?) problem - not sure what is causing it.
I'll start off with the fact that I haven't updated my current system specs here. The major changes are I have upgraded RAM to 24 GB (same brand/type as before) and I have attached a smaller second screen to this configuration (Philips 190V).
Everything is working fine but recently a friend of mine has asked me to use the machine for Team Fortress 2 idling (running dozens of sandboxed TF2 instances in text mode at a time). Being in text mode (CMD), it should not affect video gpu much, right? It takes ram - that I can understand. Each instance takes about 250 MB of ram without using cleanmem or similar. My problem is that when we try to load over 35-37 instances - hell breaks loose. Screens begin to flicker between dark and white, showing various portions of whatever software/window is opened... Taskbar will appear on the top of the screen, apps from left screen with appear for a second on the secondary (extended) display then go dark... Keyboard shortcuts will freeze everything for a while (sometimes 10+ minutes) and then return to the flickering (not the flickering people complain about from dual monitor on different frequencies... I never had that problem).Skype is always the first to crash when this happens... I've tried shutting down Skype.. it'll crash something else - more important.. Print Screen or any other capture software does not work while this is happening so I can't really show what it's doing, which (again) leads me to believe it is GPU issue. But 35 text mode CMD windows? I've been opening 150-200 java-based browser tabs without a problem - with only 12 GB of RAM.
Is it really my GPU?