Games Freeze with green pixels

Hi, thanks for looking at this.

Recently I bought GTA IV to play on my brand new PC. When the installation finished, I of course started the game. Looked great...for a while, until, out of nowhere my screen is filled by green pixels in a weird looking formation, something close to "..'.." with the apostrophe representing a pixel, and this little formation is replicated all over my screen randomly. Then, all keyboard and mouse functionality stop, and then The sound starts to lagggg but still plays. Nothing else really happens, but I'm forced to power off my computer.

Until this happens, the game is awesome, for the couple minutes it lasts. I thought it might just be the disc/game, but i installed Bioshock, and the same thing happened after a few minutes into the game, i also tried in windowed mode, same thing happened, except the colors changed blue, orange, etc.

Now comes the part where I give you my system specs.

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 @ 2.93GHz
2GB DDR2 RAM
512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT Alpha Dog Extreme Edition
nForce 650i Ultra Motherboard
500w PSU
Windows XP SP3

Plus, my case is huge enough and I have 6 fans, not including CPU, GPU, and PSU, to pretty much rule out that the problem lies with it overheating.

Also, please note that I have a VGA output Monitor but a DVI-I output GPU, with an adpater to solve this. Although its trivial, I thought I might add it anyways.

YES, I do have the latest drivers for my GPU, monitor, etc. No, the cause cannot be something due to dust, age, defective parts as I can play my other game FarCry 2 just fine. Which is weird, because I cranked up the setting for FarCry 2, and no lag resulted as of it. While GTA IV is still lower than the recommended settings because even if I don't go into the gameplay of GTA IV, the game will freeze in the main menu. Yeah. That depresses me.

Note: I had outdated drivers for my Creative AudioPCI sound card, but im updating right now, to see if it might somehow be the problem.

My temps for GPU are around high 50's, to low 60's, and CPU is 60's as well

Thanks for any help.

definately sounds like your videocard is overheating.

60 degrees wouldnt do it. +1 coozie. are you sure those arent the idle temps?

as for downclocking your card, its a terrible option. i had a 8800gts with a dying fan, overheating constantly, i literally glued a fan onto the outside. sure it takes up 3 slots, but it runs cooler than it ever did. better overclocks than ever on it.

Ok, i ran furmark and riva tuner, but heres the results for furmark

[ SCORE: 2443 o3Marks ] - Time: 60000 ms
Max GPU Temp: 66°C (Rivatuner said max was 65)
Resolution: 1920x1080 (FS) - MSAA: 0X
FPS: min=35 max=54 avg=41
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
ForceWare 6.14.11.8250 (3-27-2009)
GPU-Z data not available
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU X6800 @ 2.93GHz
2933 MHz
2046 Mb
Windows XP build 2600 [Service Pack 3]


On the stress test i got 76 max, running for 7 minutes. no crash tho

Not sure what to do with prime95, for atitool i just did scan for artifacts, its still going right now, can anyone run me through what to do exactly?


UPDATE: I lowered the memory and core clock, so i underclocked it, and its been running for about 20 minutes now

hopefully it keeps going, ill try gta iv in a bit, see if it keeps running.