Hardware GPU Overheated? Or is it the game?

[freemonk]

Hi everyone! I'm Lee from the UK.

Recently, I bought myself a Hard Drive, and decided to hook it up to my Wii, with the help of The Homebrew Channel and USB Loader GX. I am currently running cIOS 14, and using a WD 500gb My Book.

I installed a few games, and tried them to make sure they worked and they were perfect, witn no graphical problems at all. I then installed Cooking Mama 2: World Kitchen for my partner, and I noticed some little black flickering dots in random places, but thought nothing of it.

Then a few days later I played Another Code: R, and again noticed some flashing dots, but this time not black, but more blue-ish, similar to the colour tones around it.


What baffles me is that games like MadWorld, Super Mario Galaxy, Punchout, Okami all work perfectly fine with no problems, and they are pretty graphics heavy, yet these two games have this issue (of what I've noticed anyway).

I've read about flickering dots being linked to the GPU overheating, and I was wondering if that's the problem, or if it could be the game.

If it is the GPU, is it going to get continuously worse.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that bad, and to be honest could live with it they way it is, plus my partner uses it more that I do and doesn't notice it, but if it gets worse, what are my options, as when I first got the Wii, I had a WiiKey installed, plus it's now softmodded so that I can run the HDD.

If it is the GPU, will Nintendo repair it?


If anybody could help, I be very grateful


Thanks in advance

Lee

 

[toymin80r]

If it's the GPU, Nintendo will repair it, but most likely you'll have to pay for it (it's about 80 bucks, i think) unless the Wii's under warranty.

 

[freemonk]

So why is it happening on only a couple of games? Surely if it was the GPU, it would be happening on ALL games, and the menu!

 

[afnuke]

mine got fried.....it didnt happen on all games.....just some. The virtual console games were the worst for me, and I rarely played them. after a couple weeks the system menu started getting them, then you can forget it. I deleted everything and sent it to nintendo...now I have a new one which I installed a fan on the bottom to push all the heat out.

 

[freemonk]

That's good to know.

At the moment, it's not bad at all, only around a dozen dots on a couple of games. If it does get worse, and by the sounds of things it will, then I will wipe everything off, and send it to the big N.

The only worry is when they open it up and find a Wiikey inside! I've read that people who have sent there Wii into Nintendo with a Wiikey, have told Nintendo that they brought it second hand, and therefore don't know anything about it.

You loose the WiiKey, but with the softmods out now, there's not much use for it.


Thanks for the help everyone!

 

[hartleyshc]

When I started noticing artifacts on mine, it was only during fog type effects. Resident Evil and Ghostbusters are when it would show up, again, only during fog effects.

As soon as I noticed it, I took the Wii apart, replaced all of cooling gel pads with artic silver, and did the always on fan mod. (Will replace the fan as some point)

So far so good. It doesn't fix what you have, but it keeps it from getting worse. Luckily I caught it like the next day after initially noticing the errors on the screen.