Bios screen corruption

[99999]

I built the following system:

GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard
Q9550
radeon 4870 1gb
8gb of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166 RAM
2x 1tb HD
dvd burner
earthwatts 500 PSU

This is my first homebuilt.

Bios settings were unmodified.

XP booted fine. Games ran fine. Onboard audio was fine. etc.
memtext86+ showed no problems.

I was playing some games on XP then shutdown. I restart later, and the BIOS screen is corrupted. Loading text has corruption on it. Then, white squares on black, then no video output.

Tried resetting bios to fail-safe defaults. Same thing.

I think the problem is my graphics card or motherboard. Should I just RMA both? Any ideas what happened? Cooling should have been OK.

 

[nukemaster]

Most likely the video card. I had this with an old Geforce 4TI 4200. It was like that and slowly got worse until it happened in windows and all games.

This is normally caused by bad video ram.

Can you try a friends card to test this out?