Is something wrong with my video card/cards?

I currently have 2 2900 xt's in cf and have had them for about a month or so running fine and all of the sudden since last night I started getting artifacts on the monitor... what does this mean? are my cards dying? is my monitor dying?

Are they overclocked?? What does the ATI Control Center say about temperature? They could be overheating. (Big Suprise )

Especially since they vent to the outside of the case.

What PSU are you using?
What are the temps of the GPU in the CCC when you get these artifacts?
Have you checked and made sure everything is connected correctly?
Have you tried another monitor?

When I first bought them one was a dud and gave me tons of artifacts I rmaed it and ran off one beautifully until the 2nd one came and I ran CF and everything ran great up until last night when I was on the desktop I started getting these random artifacts which are still going on right now and seem to be worsening anyways the temp is 80 C in the overdrive panel my PSu is a 1 kilowatt silverstone which has 2 8 pinn connectors and 4 6 pin so I think I am good on power. I havent tried another monitor as my monitor is a dell 3007wfp which weighs 35 lbs but I guess I could try another 1 real quick.

I have a 25 cm side fan blowing air in and a fan on the back blowing air out pretty well. Yeah well w/e man all I knwo is i'll never go ati again that is for damn sure.

It's not unusual for the 2900 to hit in the 90's. My x1950xt hits 92 when OC, and none of the ATI software has a problem with it. If another video card has a problem, you might want to check the PSU connectors, even with a 1000W PSU, it still might be bad. Check to see if anything visibly might be shorting one or two of the cards as well. Trying another monitor will help to narrow the problem down some.

yeah, i had this same problem, i just switch the cards around and it ran fine, its got to do with the composition engine, it goes from one card through the crossfire to the composition engine then to the dvi encoder thingy, but sometimes it sends it to the ports on the wrong card and then has to be bridged back so you get artifacts, well, i hope it all runs well, those temps seem fine, my top card maxes out at 92 and my bottom at 88, lowest load was when i had my overvolted 25cm fan on high, it was 82 on the top card and 78 on the bottom

RMA it. Sounds like a bad card to me. Been there done that, move on.

How do I know which card it is? I swapped the cards around and am still getting the same effect so is it both of them? or is it the motherboard or the software or something else?

well it turns out all i had to do was turn on a setting in the ati control manager to alternate dvi operational mode and it took care of the artifacts like nothing.