For the most part, the cap failures on the TI4200 cards didn't show any outward visable signs, unlike those in power supplies, motherboards, etc. If you see a failed cap you know for sure, but otherwise the checkerboard pattern is telling by itself. However, I was once able to replicate the checkerboard on a normally working card under a very specific environment, one system in particular, if it went into power saving/sleep mode while running a Spiderman Screensaver (dont' even know where it came from), when the system awoke it had the checkerboard though never under any other situation... for whatever that's worth, I suppose you have to consider whether the checkerboard only occurs in one specific situation, one "game", contrasted with same situations where it previously worked fine.