old graphics card dying?

[PorkPieCat]

while awaiting a 7970hd purchase, my 7900gs is being pushed a lot on older games. it's gonna go to my little bro when i upgrade (he doesn't game) so hopefully it isn't broken.

recently it's developed a habit of freezing up during gaming (halo and borderlands 1), which requires a ctrl alt delete before going back into the game (every 5 or 10 mins or so). no artifacts, no overheating, the pc doesn't freeze, and it just happens on those two games. only other thing i'm playing is rayman origins at the moment, and it runs fine. anyone know what this might be? i'd hazard vram but i don't think there's a specific vram testing program out there...

cheers

 

[Purgatory]

Video Memory stress Test

http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/vmt_en

 

[Cleeecooo]

If the VRAM has died then you should get artefacts.

Does it only lock up during gaming?

 

[PorkPieCat]

thanks for the replies.

it's only during halo and borderlands, not playing any other games apart from rayman (which runs fine). just a complete screen (and sound) freeze. ctrl alt delete then alt tabbing back into the game fixes it for another 5 minutes. also never had anything like this in the 6? years or so of using this card

p.s the vram stress test found no errors

 

[PorkPieCat]

my actual ram has no errors verified by memtest. just locked up during a movie...

edit: thought it was either the graphics card or cpu or something, but it was just the driver. i'd ruled it out in my mind because i'd tried 3 different ones from 285.xx to 301.42 with no success. but the 7900gs is currently on windows' generic gpu driver, and frankly it's going to stay until the graphics card is upgraded entirely. not worth the hassle of trying out different nvidia drivers until one works, and surprisingly the windows one plays everything smoothly without any bugs. not bad. only thing is, opengl is missing