Gpu / mobo / driver issue?

[Angry]

Hey guys, I need your help.
A couple of days ago I bought a new mobo (Asus 970 pg/aura) to replace my overheating MSI and some faster RAM along with it. I installed everything without a problem, made a fresh Win 7 installation and... ran into these issues:

1) The whole screen seems out-of-focus: text is blurry, icons and pictures have jagged edges and generally fixing my eyes on one point on the screen causes eye strain. Here's a picture taken from a football manager game, mine is on the left, the one on the right is someone else's (google images): https://imgur.com/a/zWQvQ . No amount of messing with contrast, gamma or brightness has fixed this.

2) Videos. The picture is great as long as there's someting static, like a logo or a background of some sorts. But as soon as people start talking or the camera moves, the picture becomes real blurry and somewhat pixolated. Like if I switched from 1080 to 320 or there was a refresh issue. When the movement slows down, the picture gets better and there's visible focusing process. There's also strange color saturation at times.
Screenshot 1 - little motion, doesnt look like 1080, but still decent: https://imgur.com/a/OAGsn
Screenshit 2 - in motion, notice the pixels and blur: https://imgur.com/a/NSEbt

3) Games and pictures. Blur and jagged edges again. This is what happends when I zoom in to a 1080 picture: https://imgur.com/a/V207i . The pixolation and jagged edges around the mirror are a perfect example of what I'm getting with every pict. Including 2GB pics in Photoshop.

Initially I thought this was my monitor (144hz LG 24gm77, dvi-d) acting up but it's kinda obvious that if I can take screenshots of the flaws and see them on different monitors, it must be something else.

I'll include my full specs and some additional info as well:

Mobo: Asus 970 Progaming/aura
GPU: Asus Ex 1050 Ti
CPU: AMD FX 8300
RAM: 4x4 Vengeance @ 2133
OS: Win 7 64bit
PSU: EVGA supernova G3 550W
SSD/HDD: 850 EVO, Barracuda
Temps: GPU (avg 38, Max 70), CPU (avg 32, max 42, core 15-18), mobo (27-34), flow (26-35)
RAM are running stable @ 2133/1.5V according to both bios and cpu-z, no memtest errors.
Nothing is OC'd as of now.
No BSOD, freezes, crashes. Games don't stutter, fps stable.

What I've tried so far:
-reformatted and reinstalled Win, twice
-a different monitor and input
-different PSU
-older nvidia drivers, directX reinstall

Any ideas?

[DaveLembke]

If its not the monitor or monitor cable, and you have latest drivers, I would then put the blame on the video card itself... Is this video card still covered by warranty for warranty replacement?

Also.... I am pretty sure the AMD FX-8300 maximum speed RAM for internal memory controller is 1866Mhz so the 2133Mhz is likely running underclocked. I own a AMD FX-8300 system and I am running 1600Mhz DDR3 in it and its plenty fast at 1600Mhz RAM. I dont think your issues with display are result of RAM though. I am pretty sure if you eliminated everything but the video card that its the videocard.

[Angry]

If its not the monitor or monitor cable, and you have latest drivers, I would then put the blame on the video card itself... Is this video card still covered by warranty for warranty replacement?

Also.... I am pretty sure the AMD FX-8300 maximum speed RAM for internal memory controller is 1866Mhz so the 2133Mhz is likely running underclocked. I own a AMD FX-8300 system and I am running 1600Mhz DDR3 in it and its plenty fast at 1600Mhz RAM. I dont think your issues with display are result of RAM though. I am pretty sure if you eliminated everything but the video card that its the videocard.

Hey, thanks for your reply. I set the memory to run at 1866 and there's no difference. The RAM is CMZ8GX3M2A2133C11R ( http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/vengeancer-8gb-1-5v-dual-channel-ddr3-memory-kit-cmz8gx3m2a2133c11r ) and is on the mobo's supported vendor list. I forgot to say I've also tried completely different sticks (1333hz Kingston).
I booted in safe mode and the pixolation in videos was terrible - https://imgur.com/a/IcSOZ (1080 quality). 720 videos looked 320x200, it was difficult to even make out faces. Would that happen if it was my video card? Just to be sure, here's my gpuz post: https://imgur.com/a/eGSXW

Tried some adobe flash videos yesterday - I don't know how relevant this is, but entering and leaving fullscreen would turn my monitor off and on unless I turned off hw accel. When in fullscreen, it seemed like I was switched to the video's resolution (different mouse movement). There was visible screen tearing and even some distortion (lines of pixels of random colors) happening occasionally.

[patio]

Remove all power...remove and re-seat the vid card...power back up.

Any difference ?

[BC_Programmer]

I think this could be several separate issues.

The blurry appearance in certain applications could be a result of DPI Scaling virtualization. If you have a high DPI, then applications that don't declare themselves DPI aware are stretched by Windows, resulting in a blurry "out of focus" type of appearance.

Movies/Videos pretty much always have blur during moving scenes.

If you zoom in on an image, you'll see pixels, so I'm not sure what you are illustrating with that example? There is artifacting around said side-view mirror but it looks to be jpeg artifacting that would lead me to believe the image was a jpeg or was at some point a jpeg. (or otherwise lossy).


Now, The problem is that it would be hard to know the difference between artifacts present in the original content and artifacts that are being added afterwards. Movies are a wash- I don't think there are any real lossless formats to use. But if you are seeing those artifacts when editing data that you are 100% sure is not compressed (for example, if you make a new photoshop document and draw some things with the brush), Then I think that points towards a faulty graphics card. Which is also pointed towards by many of the issues you've illustrated.

How are you connecting the monitor? (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI...)

[Angry]

Thanks for your replies guys and sorry for the late response, was busy during the weekend.

I think this could be several separate issues.

The blurry appearance in certain applications could be a result of DPI Scaling virtualization. If you have a high DPI, then applications that don't declare themselves DPI aware are stretched by Windows, resulting in a blurry "out of focus" type of appearance.

Movies/Videos pretty much always have blur during moving scenes.

If you zoom in on an image, you'll see pixels, so I'm not sure what you are illustrating with that example? There is artifacting around said side-view mirror but it looks to be jpeg artifacting that would lead me to believe the image was a jpeg or was at some point a jpeg. (or otherwise lossy).


Now, The problem is that it would be hard to know the difference between artifacts present in the original content and artifacts that are being added afterwards. Movies are a wash- I don't think there are any real lossless formats to use. But if you are seeing those artifacts when editing data that you are 100% sure is not compressed (for example, if you make a new photoshop document and draw some things with the brush), Then I think that points towards a faulty graphics card. Which is also pointed towards by many of the issues you've illustrated.

How are you connecting the monitor? (HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI...)

Thanks, disabling DPI scaling in some applications sure helped, but it didn't solve the main issue. I'm aware of the defects and corruption in pictures and videos, but it feels like it's just too visible and too obvious. I'm connecting the monitor via DVI-D (to get the 144hz), I tried 3 different cables of 3 different brands, also tried HDMI, no difference.

Now, after some messing around I think I know what the issue is, but I have no clue how to get rid of it.
I tried putting the 1050ti into the second pci slot, no difference. Then I dug out my old pc with an ancient gpu (gts 250, 512mb), no problem with the picture. Then I put the 1050ti into the old pc and... no problem with the picture.
I took some screenshots and there's obviously some kind of hw contrast/brightness thing going on on my current computer: https://imgur.com/a/M64JS - the pic on the left is my old pc, it looked literally the same no matter which gpu I used.

It makes me wish my monitor had a focus wheel, because in desktop, games, videos and pictures it feels like the focus is on the background. I believe this is why any flaws stand out so much.
Naturally I tried adjusting gamma, saturation, contrast and brigtness both on my monitor and in nvidia control panel with no luck. I could make text look great by boosting the contrast on my monitor to its max, then again everything else looked bad. Simply put, it feels like that weird hw brightness is just there and all I can do is adjust it.

So I'm thinking - could some of the bios features be causing this? I admit this is my first ASUS mobo and I'm not familiar with most of its specific features. Everything's still set on default.
Any ideas?