Potential Video Card Problem?

[mavrick3020]

Alright, since yesterday I had been having trouble playing any games on my computer. When I would enter a game, my computer would run fine for about 3 minutes, then freeze and restart. Upon restart, all the text in the POST and Boot Manager screens was messed up. The majority of it is random letters being capitalized, but there are some non-alphanumeric symbols thrown in. Also, there are miscolored pixels and vertical lines on my ASUS bootup image, aswell as the Windows loading screen.

Upon loading windows, the computer again restarts and the screen goes black. It does not even start to enter the POST or boot sequence. I tried to do a system restore to sometime yesterday, and it worked for awhile, then after about 20 minutes of sitting in windows at the desktop, it did it again. This time, however, system restore had no effect. I'm now stuck in safe mode, and out of ideas.

Here are my hardware specs:

Asus A8V Motherboard
Athlon 64 3500+ Processor
nVidia Geforce 6600 (eVEGA Version, I think)
Win XP Professional/SP2 (Up to date)

If anyone has any idea what's going on, I'd appreciate the info.

 

[apdrummer]

get the nvidia monitor and find temps. your CPU or graphics card could be overheating, more likely GPU because of POST errors. Also, try loading the latest drivers. Another thing you could try is putting in a different graphics card and running it through some test games and such as well. to make sure its that graphics card.

 

[mavrick3020]

Unfortunetly I can't do any of that, as it won't run in anything other that safe mode.

 

[TheDancingFetus]

Can you open your case and cut your computer on and see if all your fans are running. Also make sure there is not a lot of dust in your case. It sounds like something is overheating or your getting bad voltages from your power supply. May want to test the power supply.

 

[mavrick3020]

Everything inside is running fine. The power supply is fine, the CPU is running cool, and I don't see any bad connectors. The only thing I can possibly think of being the problem in the video card.

 

[apdrummer]

Can you get a different video card or try your mobo's onboard graphics? to make sure its that particular card. The probabilities of it being something else are slim , but we're just trying to make sure here.

 

[Raze664]

How many fans and at what size?

 

[mavrick3020]

Alright, I managed to get a hold of another card, and the problem disappeared as soon as I swapped out my old card. Thanks for the help, all.