I think my video card might be going bad, but I don't know as I've never experienced this before.
I have an AMD 64X2 3Ghz with Corsair 2GB RAM (RAM was tested and is good). I've run PRIME on both cores for hours with no overheating issues. The video card is an EVGA 7900GS 256MB and the Nvidia monitoring program shows temps never going extraordinarily high. Motherboard is the Asrock 939SATAII with the daughterboard upgrade for AM2 processors. The problem started while I had a 939 chip and has continued to progress with the upgrade. Symptoms: I see little off-color pixels during 2D (desktop, word processing, web browsing). It actually pops up during BIOS also (big off-colored dots since boot up screen is 640x480; FYI my desktop is 1920-1200). I've never had this happen before. And over the course of 6 months, more and more have been popping up. They look like dead pixels on my monitor, but they are not. They also leave a trail if I drag a window over them. This happens at all resolutions. Also, Oblivion used to run perfectly for hours on end, but it has progressively gotten worse where artifacts show up just 2-3 minutes into the game, then it crashes. I've switched to older drivers, newest drivers, no change. I suspected heat first and so set the stock cooling fan to be on at high speed all the time, then redid the vidcard heatsink. This has done nothing to solve the issue. I have a second computer hooked up to the monitor (Dell 2405) so I know it does not have any issues. Power supply is providing ample power as per BIOS and monitoring programs. Does this sound like a video card just "going bad"? Anything else I should be looking for to pinpoint the problem better? Any suggested actions I should try before dropping come $$$ on a new card? Please help. Thanks. -Rich
