Green/pink artifacts=overheating or death?

[impeachbush]

I'm trying to decide if I should RMA my video card. Its a refurbished Gigabyte 6600gt that I've had for 2 weeks. L
ast night I was curious what the autooverclock option in the Nvidia drivers did, so I chose it. Also, I put a second drive into my computer, and like an idiot put it right above the intake case fan, which blew slightly warmer air directly onto the video card. I restarted and forgot about the autooverclock being on, and opened up far cry. In about 2 seconds of begining a game online, the screen started flashing green and pink squares everywhere, eventually covering most of the screen. I shutdown, fixed the cooling problem, rebooted, turned off autooverclock and tried again...no problems. I manually overclocked the card from 500/1000 to 575/1140, and ran aquamark3 flawlessly(62000 score), and 3dMark05 flawlessly (3400 score). I tried these again with similar results an no problems.

In another post, someone else said something about getting green and pink artifacts on their screen, and someone else replied that it sounded like a couple of ram chips on the card were dying...

Does this sound like it overheated and nothing to worry about, or did I (or the guy who owned it before me) damage the card?

 

[mooncancook]

it's probably just overheating since you have no problem running at stock speed. I got lots artifact with my 9800AIW when OC too. If you want to OC it, make sure you have adequate cooling, and put some ramsinks on the memory chips.

 

[Fenuxx]

If I was to bet on something, I would say that you reached the limit of your cards overclocking potential. All cards are different in terms of overclocking headroom, as one may overclock and perform like a bat out of hell, while others may have nill for overclocking headroom. I personally don't believe that its a cooling problem, but I could be wrong. Besides, NVIDIA's auto-oc feature sometimes tends to be a bit "off" as some as it essentially gets the best OC for a temperature, and then runs at it. Say, for example, that the card was overclocked with a core temp of oh, I don't know, 55c. The driver might overclock it to 600\1175. Then, when something intense kicks in, the clock speeds it set were too much for it to handle, and the card goes goofy, as you noticed. Try overclocking by 5MHz at a time on the core, and try a game for 15-20 minutes after each 5MHz, and find out when you start seeing artifacts. When you do, back it down by 5-7MHz, and then repeat with the memory. This should yield the OC potential for your card.

 

[Triax]

this has happened to me on my xfx 6600gt....the problem should be that your temps are running to high, just ease up on the OC and everything should b fine