In need of a new video card.

The 8800 G2 512mb is faster.

Let me put it another way. Link your suggestion for a ~250$ card that will work best at high resolutions.

Make sure it really is your video card thats failing and not another component in your system (psu, motherboard etc)

I think you should wait fro the 4870 and the 9900s, then price will drop.

The problem with the 8800GTS 320 is that games crash randomly after 20-60 minutes of play. Sometimes it bluescreens and the computer reboots, the bluescreen error is with nv_disp with an 0x0000008ea error code. Other times the games just suffers from severe articfacting and then freezes. When I alt tab out to the desktop it is in like 256 color mode and 640x480 res or worse.

The temps are all normal. Memtest runs just fine. HD has no problems.

What Power Supply are you running?

Yeah doesn't sound to good. The artifacts pretty much give it away. You could always try uninstalling and reinstalled new drivers. I assume you did that already.

Im guessing you dont want to fix the old card cause you need the excuse to buy a new one? (Thats how I justify purchases)

I've tried everything I can think of, I made a thread about it on this forum titled "video crash at least once a day".

I tried different drivers, I have enough virtual memory (double what my RAM is). I forget the exact model of the PSU but its an Antec PSU 550w. I would love to fix this card but I can't find a way to do so. Im opened to suggestion. Im not keen on spending another ~250 on a card that will barely be an upgrade from what I curretly have.

At the moment Im running the latest nvidia drivers, winxp pro sp2, a64 4200+ x2, 1gb (512x2) mushkin memory, 250gb WD sata 7200rpm HD, my virtual ram is 4gb (4x my RAM size which should be plenty, maybe even too much). If I left out anything else important please let me know.

Yeah an 8800GTS/512 wouldn't just be a small jump for you, it was be a VERY noticeable difference. My 8800GTS just spanks my old x1900xtx OCed out the wazzo. And that would be just lightly under what you currently have going on.

As mentioned your system could use a little updating. You should really get at least 2GB of RAM, that will REALLY help in current games. DDR2 800 memory is SO cheap its retarded. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820146565

Also, I would look at Overclocking that 4200+ they can usually be bumped up pretty well over their stock clock. That will also give you a nice increase.

the 8800GTS/512 is $250 or under for certain brands and some have rebates. You can always go for an 8800gt which will give you very similar performance on a budget. You can get an eVGA 8800GT for $160 after rebate, which would still STOMP your current card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130318
I like this MSI one with the sweet cooler and OC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814127329

Yeah testing it would be the best choice. Can you make the card fail? or do you have to play several hours to cause it to stop working? Maybe a local computer show would be willing to test, but you know they will charge you like $20

Kind of sounds like a heat related issue to me dude. Just for kicks and since you are getting another card perhaps anyway, I would get a pci slot cooler fan to stick under it and try to pull some heat off. Newegg has one for 4.99 supposed to move 42 cfm. I'd get something like that myself, if it doesn't work, you can use it on your next card to extend it's life. If it works, you save 200 bucks.

A good item to try is remove the stock cooler, clean off ALL the stock goop, and reapply with a good thermal paste. Maybe the GPU is being cooler well, but not the RAM. The Artifacts would be from overheating or bad video RAM.

I will be visiting an old computer shop that I used to work for tonight to do some troubleshooting. What I'm looking to do is test my card in another system to see if it has the same problems. The issue I'm going to run into though is making it crash. Is there anything that someone can recommend that will push the video aside from just playing a agame like crysis? Is there a benchmark program or stress test program I can run that might do the trick? I've tried the ATItool test thing, but that doesn't cause problems, it only seems like graphic intense games at 16x10 or higher cause problems, if I run at a lower res w/ no eye candy it seems to do ok as of now, but I think its slowly dying.

It used to be that if I ran a game like WoW in windowed mode it wouldn't crash, but now even then its starting to cause artifacts even windowed after a certain period of time.

At this point I hope it is the video card, if its something else I think I'll wind up going w/out a computer for a while till I can upgrade the whole thing, no sense in replacing a mobo or chip at this point.

Though if you wanted, for 200 you put together a cheap AMD system. So if it's something else, it may not be as bad as you think. If you have a lot of parts to reuse.

I will post an update tomorrow. I'm gonig to a computer shop I used to work at to do some troubleshooting and figure out what the deal is.

Thanks for all the suggestions and help.

Yeah it's time to put the ol girl down. The new GTS is a great replacement. They are rock solid and run like a champ.