video going crazy

[X2Xtreme360]

I was just doing some homework and my computer was fine. I played NFS underground for about 10 minutes and all of a sudden the game freezes. No problem. I reboot and the screen pixelates a couple of times from the desktop. I load the game and it freezes again. I reboot one last time. The game freezes again and after that reboot my screen is going absolutely pixel crazy. I saw a message down to the bottom right stating that my VGA driver has just recovered from blah blah blah. So I was thinking that it was my video card because even my systems boot up screen looks kind of pixely. The BIOS is pixelated as well. I just booted into safe mode and everything looks crystal clear here. I have a gigabyte hd4850 graphics card. This is my first system with a PCI-E graphics card and I have no other graphics card to test it with. Any input on what the problem could be?

UPDATE: I uninstalled my VGA driver and rebooted regularly. The display, although very large, looked fine. Windows of course went ahead and scanned for a driver for my video card and installed it. I rebooted the PC after that and it went right back to the awful looking pixely display. The PC was highly unstable and would just freeze. I am typing this message in safe mode with networking and the display is fine. Sound like a GPU issue? Sounds like a driver issue to me but what do I do to fix it?

Took each DIMM out individually and ran PC. Same result with each stick so I know it couldn't be the RAM unless both sticks went bad at the same time (highly unlikely). Briefly ran memtest with no errors. PC temp is optimal. Reset BIOS settings just to be sure. It doesn't matter which driver version I install it yields the same result. PC runs perfectly fine with driver uninstalled.

 

[KSoD]

You may want to uninstall your video card drivers then use Driver Sweeper from Guru3D and make sure that the drivers dont get installed again. then go to either ATi or nvidia's site and get the latest drivers for your card and install them.

 

[X2Xtreme360]

Shoulda mentioned that I already did that. Basically I've been on the PC now for a couple of hours in normal mode without the drivers installed and it's running perfect. The moment I install any driver version the PC display goes haywire and I get random BSOD's with a different cause each time. I'm about to just do a clean install and prey that it works. I played NFSU2 for hours the other day with zero issues. Today I raced one race and it forced me to reboot. THAT'S the moment the trouble began. Prior to that, as I said, I was on the PC doing homework for quite awhile issue free.

 

[X2Xtreme360]

Before RA'ing the card, I think I will test the PSU. I turned the PC on today and it seemed stable for about 5 minutes. I went into the BIOS and manually set the PCI-e frequency from "auto" to "100MHz". As I entered the OS I went into Catalyst to manually set the fan speed to 100%. Shortly after I set all those settings the display began to go crazy again until the screen filled with vertical lines again. The PSU in this system was used in my old system and was designed for a P4 board. It's 550W and has never failed me. I've used it on this PC for 2 months with no issues until last night...

 

[Nitestick]

It definitely sounds like a probably graphics driver/card issue with a PSU being the next likely cause.

 

[X2Xtreme360]

It definitely sounds like a probably graphics driver/card issue with a PSU being the next likely cause.

That's what it sounds like to me since with the drivers uninstalled the PC runs very stable.

Could someone please explain to me why that is? It doesn't matter which driver version I run... it yields the same results. Why are the graphics fine without a driver but bad with one?

 

[X2Xtreme360]

I have some new info. I noticed in the Windows action center about 50 messages like this (it makes sense since I tried to fix the problem all night on Wednesday):

Description
A problem with your video hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly.

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
OS Version: 6.1.7100.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

Files that help describe the problem
WD-20091028-2144-01.dmp
sysdata.xml
WERInternalMetadata.xml

View a temporary copy of these files
Warning: If a virus or other security threat caused the problem, opening a copy of the files could harm your computer.

Extra information about the problem
BCCode: 117
BCP1: 86645510
BCP2: 93815C26
BCP3: 00000000
BCP4: 00000000
OS Version: 6_1_7100
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1

Should I just assume my video card has crapped out?