Sudden video issue on 2yr old computer

[SithSolo1]

My brother has had his computer since since May of '07 and it has worked flawlessly since then...until lastnight. According to him he started up world of warcraft like he always does and after about 30 secs the screen froze, went out and came back with the colors shifted/reversed(he says almost like a negative), the screen then went black then came back with the image all fragmented.

I've checked it and so far on the boot screen(MSI startup image) there is a green shift of white colors and a grouping of bright, thin vertical blue lines on the left half of the screen. Whenever text is displayed during the boot process there are 5-6 colums of text that are constantly shifting characters spread across the right half of the screen. On the windows load screen the white outline around the loading bar has areas shifted green.

The computer will not boot into windows normally. It hangs on a black screen and sometimes goes to a blue screen showing an error with the nv4_disp file. It will boot into safe mode, but there are groupings of the blue vertical lines across the entire screen.

So far we've ruled out the monitor as it works fine on other computers in the house.
We, did a clean wipe of the video drivers in safe mode with no effect.
We've tried both DVI and VGA cables with the card on other monitors with the same issue. We've also tried re-seating the card and putting it in the 2nd PCI-E slot.

We don't have another PCI-E video card on hand to test and none of the other computers in the house have PCI-E slots to test the card in.

EVGA 640-P2-N821-AR GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
MSI P6N SLI-FI LGA 775
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB
CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX
320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS
Windows XP Pro

 

[daveybrat]

Sounds like the graphics card is failing to me. That's the only thing that causes those particular symptoms you describe.

 

[Ausm]

Originally posted by: daveybrat
Sounds like the graphics card is failing to me. That's the only thing that causes those particular symptoms you describe.

:thumbsup:

That would be my first guess also. Just as a precaution double check the GPU fan and make sure it is working properly. The GPU fan failing will do this also.

 

[RebateMonger]

I just had an old MSI Ti200 (GeForce 3) graphics card fail on me. It caused all sorts of symptoms. I saw weird "blank" screens, Machine_Check_Errors on boot, freezing of Windows after logon, and a handful of other errors. Nothing was ever written to the Event Log, and I don't think I ever got a Memory Dump, either. That computer had been working flawlessly for six years or so.

It wasn't a software problem, since I installed an entirely different hard drive and restored the entire system back to last September's disk image (using Windows Home Server's backups).

I think the damage was caused by hooking up the Composite Video output to an old Radio Shack RF converter. The converter didn't work right, but I suspect it put some unexpected voltages into the Composite Video output of the graphics card.

I switched to the built-in VGA connector on the motherboard itself and things started working perfectly.

 

[SithSolo1]

I put in an rma request with evga, we'll see what happens.