Graphics Tearing - Card Dying?

Hello! Very sorry for the confusing post, but I would appreciate some advice.

I recently purchased a new monitor after my last one died a sudden death, and as it's larger I've had to alter my settings accordingly. At first everything was fine. But these past few days I have been getting freezes on the WoW startup screen, and today it escalated to violent flickering and a black screen. I literally cannot get in the game, and even starting it up in windowed mode doesn't seem to have made a difference.

I am no expert in these matters, although I have had a similar problem before when I received a Geforce 9800gt card as a gift, and was right in thinking it would never work with my system when it caused tearing and sudden freezes during gameplay. I instead fitted my ex's 6800gs and everthing has been great until now.

I cannot tell if it's my monitor's new settings that is putting the card under such stress, or whether my card is dying. I know I cannot fit anything much better in my system as I cannot afford to update it much.


I must sound confused, but I have to confess that I'm completely bewildered as to what to do next.


I have included a Dxdiag with this post, and I hope someone can help me figure out what to do - buy a new card, change monitor settings or start saving for a new system?

You are running an old driver, try and get a new driver from www.nvidia.com and see if the problem goes away.

I tested the card with another game and it refused point blank to work, and for a long shot I tested it by ATITools and it failed the artifacts test miserably. I'm fairly sure now it's on its last legs. It was pretty old when I got it, so at least I got a good six month's use out of it.

I've reverted back to my old card, a Radeon X600, and it's still working, but I'd like to replace the other one if I can. The trouble I'm having is that I can't find anyone selling the exact same card, but I'm scared to buy anything else as I have no idea if it will work with my system. I can find lots of Nvidia 6800 cards, but there are so many letters added to the names that I haven't a clue what it all means.

The one I had was a Point of View 512mb 6800 gs PCI-E. The one that looks most similar is an nVidia GeFoce 6800 XT 512MB AGP 8X, but it sounds too flashy for my system. I'm still searching...