Is my graphics card dying?

[gorillawarfare]

A week ago, while watching a youtube video, the video froze and serious graphics artifacts showed up on my screen leading to a blue screen. Restarting my computer would always result in graphics artifacts showing up either as Windows was booting, or at the desktop, leading to a crash. I decided to reinstall Windows to see if that could help, and it did in the sense that I could use my computer without crashing or having graphics artifacts appear, but once I reinstalled Nvidia drivers, the glitches and crashes came back. I tried moving my graphics card to the other slot on my motherboard and installing the drivers once again to see if it would work, but it did not. So now I simply have to use my computer without any graphics drivers installed. I am just wondering though, if my graphics card is dying, then why does it still display video for me? I am currently still using the graphics card, it is connected to my monitor; I just find this puzzling. Could it be that my graphics card isn't dying, and that something else has gone wrong? Anyways, if this is my graphics card dying, then it has come about on time (a tad bit early admittedly) because I was planning on upgrading to a NI card soon anyways.

Specs

Win Xp 32 bit
Core 2 Duo e6700
Nvidia 8800gt
Asus P5NSLI
3 gigs RAM
Antec TPQ 850

 

[nboy22]

It sounds like it's either dying, or overheating. One time my buddy bought a used ATI 9800 pro from the anandtech forums and the user didn't actually tighten down the aftermarket heatsink on the GPU correctly. This resulted in artifacts all over the screen, but when we would let the machine sit and cool overnight, it would turn back on completely fine in the morning. I would either look at using the warranty on your card, or if you have no warranty, take the heatsink off of your card, re-apply some thermal paste, and then re-apply the heatsink and see if that helps.

 

[gorillawarfare]

Thank you for the suggestion. I just tried reapplying thermal paste, and cleaned out all the dust my card has accumulated over the years, and nothing has changed though. The problem only happens once I install video drivers.

 

[dpodblood]

Have you tried installing an older version of the drivers? Artifacting is usually a result of over heating, due to dust or overclocking. Has this card been overclocked in the past, if so there is a possibility it is damaged.

 

[gorillawarfare]

I actually have tried many different versions of drivers, from old to beta now. I actually made it to windows earlier with drivers installed, but my graphics card obviously wasn't working as moving windows around was as sluggish as if the drivers weren't installed. Anyways, I checked my device manager, and under my graphics card it said that the device could not start...

I guess it is time for a new graphics card then.

 

[YoshiMon]

It sounds like the GPU is indeed dying. As for why it only artifacts when you install the drivers my theory would be that when your running just the built in WinXP drivers the calls to the GPU via that API are so 'vanilla' as it were that does not either a) heat up the chip to the point where it starts to fail or b) does not use the parts of the chip where it has problems.

You could test the former by really trying to cool the card down with the drivers installed. I was able to eek a bit more life out of one of my old nVidia cards by opening up my case and putting, in addition to it's normal cooling, a fan directly at it. Not even close to a good even really short term solution but it gave me a bit more time while I shopped for a new card. (And showed me that I really needed to be aware of my cooling.)