video card problem?

[Shmalls]

My grand father bought an Alienware desktop computer about 4 years ago, so its a bit older (just like my grand-pa, he likes his flight sim games! [but then, who dosnt?]) any way, what happens is, he starts his comp and it runs for around 30 - 45 seconds, then gets a bunch of horizontal lines, or artifacts on the screen wich last for about 2 seconds, then the screen goes black. it seems to me that the machine is still running, and just the video card dumped.

bad drivers? bad GPU/card? heat build up?

any one got any ideas.

p.s. its not the monitor, we have tried several.

 

[weewegs2543]

I'm not a huge expert, but because of the artifacts you described it sounds to me like the computer has a heat problem with the video card. Perhaps the heat sink on the video card has slipped off the GPU, or the GPU fan has stopped working. It sounds like the rest of the computer is okay; you should try another video card and see if the same thing happens. Incidentally, how long has this been going on?

 

[Shmalls]

Its been off-n-on now for a few weeks. he told me that if you re-seat the vid card it will work fine for a few hours. then crash.

 

[Conky]

Checking the heatsink/fan on the videocard would be the first thing I would look at but it sounds like that videocard is just plain ready to be replaced.

 

[weewegs2543]

When you say reseat the vid card, do you mean the heat sink on the GPU? Or do you mean the whole card in the slot?