Way to test if my video card is bad?

[zachalbert]

I need some help figuring out a strange problem. My display will occasionally disappear; it stays powered on but appears as if the computer is off (no connection). The computer is obviously still on, I just can't get a picture.

My video card is an nvidia geforce 7950 GT and it's worked fine for the past year and a half.

Not sure if this is related, but I've recently had problems with my onboard nic. My mother board is an msi 975X. I would boot up and my networking card would be disabled by default, and sometimes just crap out. Restarting would sometimes reenable it. Not a big deal. However, once I disabled it permanently and installed a pci nic, my display problems were fixed... for about 2 weeks.

I can sometimes get my display to come up by powering off and switching which dvi port I'm connecting to (there are 2 on my card). Once, I switched it to no avail, so switched back and my display came back up. Weird...

Any thoughts? Is my video card or motherboard going bad? Is there a way to test it? (FYI--everything in my computer is the same age; about a year and a half)

 

[br3nd064]

I'd suspect the motherboard. The problems sound like it, and the reviews on newegg are pretty bad. I don't really know what's the best way to test it though...

If you happen to have another motherboard you're not using or if you can get one really cheap, you can swap it out for that.

 

[dagger]

You can stress the card and see if it holds.
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/

 

[zachalbert]

Hm, so beyond swapping it out with something, I'd just have to get a new board and hope it works?

At this point it's an erratic problem and it'll work fine for a week before doing the weird stuff so I wish there was a more definitive way of testing it.

 

[br3nd064]

That's the way I would test it. Try to swap one from a pc you're not using/borrow one from a friend.