Possible Graphics Card Problem?

[bonobo]

Hey all,

I had a hard time choosing a category for this issue. I'm really not sure whether the problem lies with my motherboard, my processor, my hard drive, my graphics card, or what. Here's the problem:

Rebooting my machine has become a chore. It will fail at various stages, sometimes after the initial motherboard splashscreen, sometimes with the DOS cursor blinking, and sometimes after the Windows XP progress bar finishes. Most notable, however, is when I get to my XP login screen, and I get a garbled image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/3346411...25530/sizes/l/

I can tell that the machine is responsive at this point because when I move the mouse around I can tell that the pixels are moving around in their garbled state. It is the graphical nature of the issue that leads me to believe there's a possible issue with my graphics card.

For the most part once I successfully login after many reboot attempts, the computer functions just fine. The issue has been getting progressively worse for several months (rebooting takes more attempts), even after installing Windows on a brand new hard drive. Within the past few days, however, my system has started crashing during graphically intense operations (photoshop, Maya). I ran an nVidia stability test with no problems.

I have removed components from my machine and dusted thoroughly. I have set up a window fan to blast directly into the guts in case there is an overheating issue. It's questionable whether these efforts have made a difference.

To shed some doubt on the graphics card theory, I ran a CHKDSK on my one-month-old harddrive and it came up with some problems (e.g. "Deleting index entry CO52D6~1 in index $I30 of file 107865.").

I'm really at a loss as to what to do here. Any ideas? Thanks!


Machine Info:

Windows XP Pro

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz Socket AM2 89W Dual-Core Processor

SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Patriot Extreme Performance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

ECS KN3 SLI2 (1.0) AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard

EVGA 768-P2-N831-AR GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

RAIDMAX AURORA RX-580F 580W ATX12V Power Supply

[mjc]

Exercise the warranty on the EVGA card...

[Heartborne]

You are absolutely dealing with a defective video card here. Send it back!

[Sun-Tzu]

Did you run a test on the memory too?

[bonobo]

Thanks for the replies!

Mjc and Heartborne: I called EVGA and they said they're more than willing to send me a replacement. Hopefully that will solve the problem!

Sun-Tzu: I have not run a memory test. What tools do you recommend for that?

[Gecko 1123]

Try taking out 1 stick of RAM. Then try putting that one back in and taking out the other. Try taking out one stick and trying the other in the other slot. Then switch the sticks of RAM and repeat. After seeing the image, I think this might be a RAM problem. As for the program, try Memtest, available from http://www.memtest.org/

[bonobo]

Hey Gecko, thanks for the suggestions. I have tried many arrangements of RAM and unfortunately I continue to have the same problem. I downloaded memtest, but for some reason I cannot get this to run on my machine. I burned the ISO to a CD, but when I try to boot from this, I get the following and it just hangs:

Boot from CD :
1. FD 1.44MB System Type-(00)

Loading................

I know the CD is good because I can boot from it on my laptop just fine.