Video card issues

[TempletonPeck]

Today, when I went to play a game, my screen froze completely, went kinda a yellowish colour and was unresponsive.

I had to physically power off the machine (which I hate to do).

Some basic info: It's a NVIDIA GeForce 8 series card, PCI-E slot, Windows XP is the OS.

Upon restart, instead of the Windows desktop, I got the same screen I had when the machine froze. The yellowish garbled screen of nothing.

I again had to physically power off.

I noticed that there was like gibberish mixed in with the normal text during the POST and regular boot-up.

I was able to load safe mode and it started Windows in safe mode no problem. In fact everything looked normal in safe mode.

I uninstalled the NVIDIA drivers (thought maybe they were corrupt, although I was leaning towards the video card being toast) and then rebooted. I got the same bit of gibberish during bootup, but Windows loaded this time round (not safe mode).

I grabbed the latest NVIDIA driver (note: I had been using the same drivers for months with no problem previously) and then upon restart, same kind of issue, Windows wouldn't load, just a blank screen.

I pulled the video card and placed a old card I had in the same slot, a NVIDIA 7 series card. The gibberish was gone at startup and I loaded into Windows (albeit with a limited resolution).

I wiped out the old driver and tried to put on one appropriate for the older card, the install just freezes half way through every time though.

So is Windows the problem now, or am I missing something here? Something else hardware related?

I'm not really in the mood to re-install Windows again (just did it not that long ago), but I'm leaning that direction.

Any thoughts?

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Sounds like your first card either has something physically wrong, or a major heat problem. And you're probably dealing with a separate problem with your second card.

The other possibility is something went wrong on your motherboard that's affecting your graphics card slot. Maybe try the card(s) in a different PCI-E slot?

 

[Zensal]

Had this problem on a clients machine.

The video card is defiantly the most likely culprit, and I agree with LokutusofBorg that it is most likely 2 entirely separate issues.

The garbled stuff on start up is defiantly video problems.