weird problem, what do you think is the fault

[trillian]

I have a Gainward Ultra 2400 "Goes Like Hell" (6572) GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
card and something strange is happening.

(this is actually on my boss's machine)

Apparently during a session with BF2 the game shut the computer down and this started happening when it was booted up again;

When the computer is turned on the display is imediately filled with what looks like random text characters. Behind this 'curtain' of jibberish it looks like the mobo is trying to POST.

When I first saw it I thought it looked like a loose AGP card, so I opened it up and re-seated the card but it didn't help. (the fans on the card are running and it looks fine)

Does this sound like a hardware issue or is there some way such a thing could happen to the drivers ? The catch-22 is that with the display unreadable you really cannot get in to do anything.

The other machine specs are; Neo2 platinum mobo, Athlon64 3500 venice core, 2 gig RAM. It has not been OC'd, both the CPU and graphics card have been running at stock speeds.

 

[Behemoth]

I'd probably say to be honest that it's either the card which has generated a fault, or you've got a lot of dust on the cooler stopping the air from getting to the core properly. Might be worth popping the GPU cooler off clearing out any dust, cleaning the core up and putting a fresh layer of thermal paste down on it and then making sure that the card cooler is re-seated properly. If it's still the same then it's the card.

May be worth trying it in another AGP machine before you go to the extreme of taking the cooler off though,if it works in another machine it could be the AGP slot.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Id say its a dead card, my mates GTS done the same thing the other day, he was playing Stalker, crashed, he rebooted was fine, so he put another game on, then not long after the screen went weird, rebooted and he got all those weird characters, and gibberish to, so hes getting his card replaced as its dead.