Dying Video Card?

[imported_Imp]

Ok, still kinda of shocked right now, but I came home from work today, turned on my computer and was greeted with a scrambled image. It finished loading up windows and then my monitor went into stand-by mode. Tried pressing the power button, but that did nothing. I had to turn the power off from the PSU. Thinking it was a loose VGA plug, I screwed the two screws into my VC's port a bit more (they weren't tight). After turning the PSU back on, it's fine again now. So is this how a video card tells you it's on the verge of dying?

It's a BFG 7600gt so I'm not worried about warranty (lifetime), but it would be very disheartening to have to RMA it. This card has only been in my system for about 2 weeks. It has shown no problems before and ran perfectly up until 3am last night running a DVD. Also, I'm not sure if I noticed or not, but I don't remember hearing the fan spin up like it has always done on any type of boot. Also, someone in my house had a 6600 die in a similar manner with scrambled picture, and then it suddenyl stopped working. So knowing this, I don't know if a loose plug should behave like this or not.

 

[996GT2]

Well, my old PIII comp once had a similar problem. I booted it up and a purplish, garbled screen came up, but after I screwed the VGA connector in more firmly the problem went away. However, in my case, the plug was only about 4/5 of the way in, so if yours is fully in (even if it isn't screwed in tightly), that could be a bad sign.

 

[imported_Imp]

Well, the VGA cable is screwed into a DVI-VGA adapter so maybe the extra bending was a problem. Wish I payed more attention to the fan spin-up, but was distracted by the screen... If it didn't spin up, I'd know how deep the problem went. Also, it can play Oblivion for 6+ hours straight with no lock-up, so it can't be heat. About the power button thing, I'm not sure what it does when pushed when windows is running the show(under power management it says "shut down"). In "DOS?" (pre-windows load), it'll turn off. Lucky for the lifetime warranty, but my instore direct-exchange was only 10 days:|.