PC shut down under load and will not start properly, please help

flyboychuckles

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I have been trying to troubleshoot my problem and wanted some other opinions.
I built this PC over four years ago, no overclocking, 99% gaming.

I have been playing ME3 for a few weeks now and the other night the game slideshows, windows tries to restart the graphics (black screen flickering), then the PC restarts. I shut down for the night to let things cool off/settle down. 12 hours later I try again, but the boot screens are corrupted with symbols and shapes, nothing intelligible. Windows starts to load, then black screen, and reboot. I can get into safe mode.

I thought GPU, so I threw in my old 8800GTS. The boot screens do not have symbols, but I have vertical purple lines and I can get into windows (non-safe mode).

I loaded the RAM one at a time in different slots, no change.

Could it be PSU? The GTX 285 has two power connectors to 8800's one
Motherboard? I was thinking of resetting the BIOS

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
EVGA GeForce GTX 285
Corsair 750W PSU
2x WD hard drives
Vista Home Premium

EVGA 8800GTS (old card)
 
Have you tried a different available pci port on your mobo?

I would've said it was both graphics cards but that seems unlikely. Try putting it into a different slot, maybe the pins inside got bent or shorted or some nonsense.
 
Try updating drivers to begin with.

Uninstall them in Safe Mode, and then installed the newest drivers from nVidia's website.
 
So far no changes.

I have just the one slot for the video card so I cannot switch slots. I uninstalled/re-installed drivers with no changes. I re-flashed the bios with no changes. I have windows 7 home, for some reason I thought I had vista.

Right now I am running a deep virus scan to see if anything is found. A few days before this my home power was flickering during a bad storm, but not enough to completely reset PC or clocks. Would it be worth getting a PSU tester?

I've uploaded a picture of what my BIOS looks like.
 

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Have you tried reseting the BIOS? Do this by powering down the system, unplug it from the wall, press the power button a few times to drain any left over power stored in the PSU. Then, remove the silver coin battery on the motherboard and/or short the reset jumpers. Leave the battery out for about 30 seconds. Then place it back in, and start your computer back up.
 
Yes carnagex, I reset the CMOS and loaded the fail-safe defaults, but no change. I have my old 8800gts loaded as that one only scrambles 33% of my BIOS. I cannot get any further than loading Windows in Safe mode. I tried a different set of PCI-E 6 pin connectors as the PSU has 4 total, but no change.

Virus scan found nothing.
 
Get a really cheap new video card locally, see how that works. If that fixes it then return that one and exchange it for a better card. if not, then just return the card. The re-stock fee will be much less than taking it in to have someone else check it
 
Get a really cheap new video card locally, see how that works. If that fixes it then return that one and exchange it for a better card. if not, then just return the card. The re-stock fee will be much less than taking it in to have someone else check it

My 8800gts is my second card. My main card is 285 gtx, which does even worse when installed.
 
I know this sounds weird, but i ran into a very similar issue playing F.E.A.R and when i swapped hard drives, the problem was resolved, so if you have a spare drive kicking around id say try that too.
 
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