Bad Graphics Card or PSU?

[Ornery Platypus]

Hi all,

I have been having some problems that sure seem to be related to my GPU (an HD4870x2). The symptoms are green lines and pixels from POST screen on (leads me to believe it is not drivers), lockups, black screens, screens covered in artifacts, BSOD's, "driver stopped working but has recovered" messages. Before I replace the card, I would like to rule out the PSU as a possible underlying cause. My system:

Core 2 Quad Q9300 OC'd to 3.0 GHz
(have been running stable at 3.1+ GHz for well over a year)
EVGA 750i FTW LGA775 Mobo
HD4870x2 GPU
(never OC'd)
Hiper HPU-5B680 680 watt PSU
4GB G.Skill DDR2 1000
Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Sound Card
640 GB WD Hard Drive
500GB WD Hard Drive
DVD Burner
Floppy Drive
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Ambient temps are always under 70F and the card is not heating up any more than usual. The card has never been overclocked. I have tried putting the card in the other PCIe slot and using the other DVI port. With no luck, I swapped the card out for two 8800GT 's I had from an earlier build in SLI. This worked fine for the brief time I ran it. Unfortunately, I had to pull one of the cards out as its fan is dying so I have lost the benefit of testing with the greater power draw of the SLI configuration. However, I have not subsequently had any trouble with the single 8800GT.

Is it a safe bet that problem really is the GPU and not the power supply? Is there anything further I can do to check, short of installing the HD4870x2 in another machine? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[denis280]

(I have not subsequently had any trouble with the single 8800GT.) there is your answers.

 

[ntrthamatrix]

What happens if you test one card at a time? Maybe one card is bad did you buy them brand new?

 

[dbailey]

It sounds like the video card for sure. But the only way to know is to pop in in another machine. Maybe it is still under warranty and you can just get it replaced?

 

[Majic 7]

Probably the card. I had one and it started going bad at about two years. There is a long thread at Guru3D with many posters having the same trouble. It was vreg I think. Everytime it got to 90c soon after I would get a black screen and a driver stopped working. All other temps were perfectly fine. I checked with GPUZ on a secondary monitor.

 

[Ornery Platypus]

Thank you so much for the responses.

Good call about the warranty! Never figured it was still covered but it looks like I have about a month left.