Broken Graphic Card?

[Guning7]

Hello all,

Yesterday, after turning on my comp and loading up COD:Modern Warfare, my computer completely froze. This has never happened before in the 3 years I've had this comp and I was unable to alt f4/ctrl+alt+del or do anything so I had to do a hard reset by holding the power button. When it started to boot up, I saw weird grey lines in a Matrix(the movie) like patterns running down the Bios screen. After logging into Windows via password, it seemed as if the monitor turned off and everything went black, yet the computer was still running. I searched online to see any solutions and tried disabling the video cards through safe mode. Safe mode was able to boot up, but had these plaid green squares in it, identical to the squares in the topic of "Plaid green squares and gaming issues" over at Tech Support Forums( I can't post any links sorry ) I was able to disable the video cards and after restarting, I was able to successfully log into windows. The green squares were still there and sometimes, when I toyed around with the resolution, random red pixels would be scattered throughout the screen.

I tried disabling and enabling the video cards several times and it seems that when it is disabled, I am able to log into windows, but when it is enabled, after typing my password into windows, the monitor displays nothing and goes black.

I also tried downloading new drivers from Nvidia(have Nvidia geforce 7950GX2) but nothing worked. Eventually I wiped the HD and reinstalled windows, downloading new drivers for all parts, but the same problem also existed. I even got solid red plaid squares at the screen where it says to choose which mode you would like to boot up in (ie Safe Mode/Safe Mode with Networking/Safe Mode with Command Prompt etc...)

I opened it up and cleaned out the video card and reseated it, yet the problem is still there.

I am convinced that it is the video card problem, but have no real way to test it out because I have no other computer or video card. Are there any other ways to make sure it is indeed the video card, before I go and buy a new one heh.

Thanks in advance!!

 

[dividebyzero]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but...
Your graphics card is artifacting. Compare with some classic examples here
http://images.google.co.nz/imgres?i...=video+card+artifact+pictures&hl=en&sa=X&um=1

The checkerboard pattern is a textbook example of having a "cooked" GPU. This particular card is known to run very hot and even a small build up of collected dust would raise this even further. Unfortunately the damage is irreversible.

As you have two seperate cards connected by an internal SLI bridge, even narrowing down the fault to doubly hard over a single GPU card.
You'll need to buy a new card.

 

[Guning7]

Just to be safe I brought the video card to a friend's house and tried it out on his cheap computer(It is one of the stock ones from Costco). I popped the video card in and when we turned it on, something inside just started beeping really loud. It was one long beep followed by three short ones and was not something that happened regularly with the comp. The computer seemed to not even be able to startup as nothing at all was displayed on the screen. When I took the video card out, the comp worked just fine. So I'm guessing it's the video card

O well...Thanks for the advice dividebyzero. Newegg here I come!