Texture / poly "tearing" problem

[kevinauld]

I was wondering if anyone could help me out.

I've been playing Warcraft on this PC for the last year, all fine. Nothing has changed - I'm tech savvie enough to know what my pc is and isn't doing - but suddenly and seemingly at random, I'm noticing polygon and texture stretching and disruption.

Here's a grab:

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/6...8231855ua7.jpg

You can see the misplaced lines and so on. It really seems to affect trees. It seems to happen totally at random with no real thing to make me think "thats causing it". Sometimes it will happen after 5 mins, sometimes after an hour.

Alt tabbing to the desktop and back seems to remove it for a random amount of time, as does the game having to load a transition screen.

The laptop is an Alienware Area 51 and the card is a gf go 7600 with latest driver.

Many thanks

[Ultima]

when this would be a laptop, I'd say check yer videocard for dust and overheating, but since this is a laptop, that is kinda hard.

is it possible for you to check the temps?? I've seen this before, and usually it was the ram on the videocard, due to failure, or overheating.