is my graphics card toast?

[tigerfootball05]

My roommate installed and played Crysis on my aging computer and after a few days of it working without any major problems, the game suddenly went to black screen and froze. My roommate did a hard reset on my computer and when Windows started to load back up, there were weird pixelated blocks on the login screen. When I logged into my account on Windows, all of the graphics were horribly messed up and I really couldn't see a thing besides my cursor. I could hear programs starting up like normal and could even sometimes see some of the windows that would pop up during the normal start-up process, but all I could see were essentially four big triangles filling my computer screen (looks like a big X in the middle of my screen). I'm a little worried that Crysis worked my card too hard (a 6600gt) and the card crashed. The thing is, I can still get into safe mode and see everything no problem. I have tried reinstalling the drivers for my card and have uninstalled Crysis, but neither of those fixes seemed to work. Anyone have any idea what happened or how I can fix it?

 

[Yami]

Well, it could've overheated and damaged itself, though they tend to shut themselves off long before then.

I did have this happen to me a while ago on my old comp (GeForce 6800), and installing the latest drivers worked for some reason; you could try doing so.

 

[Dumpy]

does your mobo have on board graphics? if so p lug into that and see if the card did die, other then that i have no idea

that or see if by chance windows set the color back to 16-bit mode

 

[tigerfootball05]

I installed the latest drivers but sill no help. And no, my mobo doesn't have any on board graphics, so if it does go into safe mode and I can see everything fine (i'm in networking safe mode now), does that mean its not a hardware issue?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Still could be a hardware issue, because drivers do control the power state of higher end GPUS....

 

[tigerfootball05]

Well I think I fixed it for good. I reinstalled Vista, which did nothing to help the problem (and created a few more, more on that in another thread), so I was forced to conclude that the card was fried. I went out and bought another graphics card, installed it and now everything works fine. Crysis must have pushed my card too much and killed it. RIP.