Help! Artifacts on windows loading screen.

[Trialsking]

Last night I was playing TF2. I was getting ready to mow down the blue team when my game froze and got all kinds if of crazy artifacts. I tried to get out of the game but I was forced to hard boot. I restarted my computer and then restarted TF2. This time it froze at the TF2 options screen. Again I had to reboot. When the computer booted up, the mother board screen that comes up had lines all through it, and the windows XP loading screen had blue bars in vertical columns.

When it finally booted up, it was like I now had no drivers. My screen rez went from 1440x900 to 800x600. I figured it was a driver problem as I had the 177.79 beta drivers but I did not have any problems to this point.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the 177.83 drivers and the exact same thing happened with loading screen and rez setting. When I open Rivatuner is states that there are "no supported drivers for this display adapter"

I tried installing all three previous nVidia drivers that had worked fine before with the exact same result. It shows in the add/remove programs that I have the nVidia drivers installed but it is like my video card is not using them. When I used to install drivers, half way through the install windows would make that sound when you attach a new device like a USB, but now I get no sound when I install the drivers. I have been running the same system for almost 2 years and have not had a problem until now. Here are my system specs:

e6300 @ 2.62
eVga 8800 GTS 640 OC'd @ 575/900
2 GB Corsair pc6400
COOLMAX CW-650T 650W EPS12V
150 GB Raptor
Windows XP SP3

Any suggestions?

edit: even my screen saver now has 6 yellow vertical lines on the left side of the screen! But the artifacts don't appear in normal windows or the internet.

 

[dokk2]

you did check to make sure that your video card is firmly seated and connected at both ends and not overheating???
i don't suppose that you have another mobo that you can test the card in??

 

[Trialsking]

The card is seated firmly. I tried switching power cords from PS to the cards. That did nothing. Unfortunately I do not have another MB or video card to swap out. As far as temps go, I use Rivatuner to monitor card temps, but now it does not see any drivers so I can't get a card temp. I had the fan set to 100% and it still sounds like it is going at that. Any suggestions on another program that could use to monitor card temps?

I just wanted to exhaust all possibilities before I send it back to eVga. Luckily I have a life time warranty. But at the same time I might use this as an excuse to build a new machine. I was going to wait another year, but I have to see how this works out.

 

[Trialsking]

Well it seems I fixed my problem. I took my card out and cleaned all the dust off the fan. Placed it back in and it started up just fine, no more artifacts, and the drivers were recognized. So far so good. Maybe I can make it another year!