Nvidia 9600gt artifacts with no overclocking??

My 9600gt produces horizantal white lines while gaming.They're more like wide bars than lines, and sometimes they're very noticed and sometimes not.I didnt overclock my gpu.The power supply is 460 w which satisfies the minimum of 400 watts required.Gpu maxes at 80 C under load in crysis, but i feel the gpu is under performing because crysis reaches 10 fps sometimes at all meduim.Cpu is intel e2220 overclocked to 2.9 ghz stable.

Should I return the gpu or what??
Could it be the monitor but i doubt that??

Please tell me if you need to know anything else.

Many thanks in advance.

Thanks for replying.
The cpu actually is stronger than the gpu. Any dual core at 2.9 ghz bottlenecks much stronger gpu's. 80 is standard temperature for many cards.For some people,its 85+ C so 80 is fine.I bought the card a week ago and I am most probably going to return it.Thanks!

Wow that is kinda high. What brand of 9600GT did you get. I got the ECS 9600GT with a passive Areo Cooler that came with it and I never get over 40. Well thats because I did mod using zipties and an 80mm fan.

Have you checked to see what the speed of the fan is??? You might have to set it to max to cool off your card better. You can use a little program called SpeedFan. This proggy allows you to set the figures for all fans in you computer that are connected to the mobo.

Just a thought.

can you list your system specs?

I hope you got that 9600gt for pretty cheap with all these new graphics cards lowering the prices.