Dead video card?

[kachaffeous]

Just want to verify my troubleshooting and get recommendations on a new card. My pc has been crashing randomly lately and most of the time the screen either freezes or I get a lot of tiny blue boxes all over the screen. Ran memtest over night and got 0 errors so I think my memory is fine. So I downloaded and ran furmark and my machine crashes almost instantly when starting that program. I uninstalled nvidia drivers completely and reinstalled them with the same symptoms.

My GPU is a 8800gts 512m and I game on a 2408FWP. Blood-Iron P35 mb w/ quad core cpu. 4g of ram.

For new video cards is the new 560 TI the best to get? I'm looking for bang/$ that will last a while. Play games at 1900x1200 res mostly wow and steam games. (Maybe looking at upgrading to 27'-30' when I get a new machine). My machine is aging so I plan on getting a new on soon, just wasn't planning on today. So looking for a decent video card to hold me over til I can get a SB sytem.

 

[BoomerD]

What do you have for a PSU? It's possible that it's on its way out as well.

 

[mlc]

... .sounds like the ram on your videocard is shot or overheating or it could simply be corrupted graphics drivers.. so try reinstalling them first...

New card will depend on your budget.... but at that desired resolution make sure you get something with 1GB of video ram.....

You can pick up a GTX 460 or HD6850 in the $150 range.... which should do nicely .. .or you can step up to something higher.. depending on your goal.... Going up to a GTX 560 will run at least another 100 or so....

As BoomerD suggested though.. make sure you have a sufficient power supply.. depending on what you step up to... generally speaking those nvidia cards (GTX xxx) require a little more juice than the ATI equivalents.. just a matter of which manufacturer you favor....

 

[kachaffeous]

What do you have for a PSU? It's possible that it's on its way out as well.

Looked at the voltages in bios and they are all steady. Double checked w/ multimeter and all the voltages are fine.

.. .sounds like the ram on your videocard is shot or overheating or it could simply be corrupted graphics drivers.. so try reinstalling them first...

Yeah I did a complete uninstall of drivers, reboot, then reinstall, reboot and the problem persisted. I'm chalking it up to a card on the way out.

Will all the new cards work w/ my motherboard P35 chipset with • 1 PCI Express x16 slot • 2 PCI Express x1 slots I'm assuming is is PCI-E 1.0 b/c the manual doesn't state any version number and the board is close to 3 yrs old. Is there any problems running a PCI-E 2.0 card in a PCI-E 1.0 motherboard?

 

[mlc]

should run fine.. PCI-E 2.0 is backwards compatible.. with all but a few of the 1st generation motherboards supporting PCI-E 1.0...