Nvidia 9800 GT Possibly Fried

[inshead]

Sorry in advance for the long story, but I want to describe what happened as good as posible.

Last night I had a game going while doing a few other things, alt-tabbing back and forth. I pulled the game up to have it freeze on me while still hearing my music and game sounds. This happened for about 10 seconds before seeing the first BSOD that mention the "nvlddmkm.sys" file. So I figured it was just a driver issue and continued to reboot windows and open the game back up to see if it would happen again, which it did almost as soon as I opened the game.

After the second BSOD, unplugged my computer, took out my video card and hit it with some compressed air. It was a little hot to the touch so I let it sit for maybe 10 minutes before reseating it and turning the computer back on. The computer booted back up just fine, so I tried opening the game again to get the same BSOD immediately.

This time I decided to boot into safe mode to check the drivers, when doing this I noticed redish dots all over my screen during the BIOS loading screen. When getting into safe mode, the screen was on 4-bit color, but the nVidia drivers were fine.

From this point I deleted the drivers and ran a driver sweep then rebooted to normal mode. I let windows install it own drivers and proceeded to try updating my cards drivers with the newest from nVidia website then rebooting.

Windows will not load in normal mode with nVidia drivers loaded, only loads into safe mode at this point. I figure I am looking at hardware failure possibly with the video card RAM.

Any suggestions would be helpful, I am posting a few pictures of the problems below.

 

[raiyus13]

What is your PSU?

Yes, those small dots do resembles a fried card. Was your card OC'ed ?
Have you spotted any fried part/area in your card?

 

[inshead]

PSU is a Corsair TX850W

Card was not OC'ed and I took my card back out again for another cleaning, nothing noticeable with it still. Had no odor to it last night either.

 

[raiyus13]

Have you tried running the PC with some other card, just to check the PSU.

I got the same patterns ,like the same minute dots when i fried mine. so, its quite certain that its your GPU that got fried.

Just to make sure, is your OS booting? and is it able to show the desktop or just freezing when when it is just going to do so?

and last question, is the warranty still valid ?

 

[inshead]

I dont have any other PCI-E cards available where I am at right now.

OS is actually booting yet, but it will only boot in normal mode after I totally remove the nVidia drivers. If I try to boot it with them installed, I just get a blank black screen after BIOS loading screen.

As far as the warranty, I would have said no. I purchased the card back in September 2008 but didnt use it right away. Nvidia websites states that it has a 2 year warranty, so maybe I should look into it.

 

[bystander]

The 2nd picture looks just like how my 9800gt recently looked. I took it out (it was used for physX and my 2nd monitor) and everything is back to normal.

 

[raiyus13]

Have you got an onboard graphics? have you tried running in it?

 

[inshead]

No onboard video

I just ran up the road to Best Buy and got another PCI-E card. I will let you guys know how it works.

 

[inshead]

So far so good, computer booted up immediately with no dots.

Windows is reverting some update changing right now so I am not totally in the clear yet.

I purchased the closest thing to what I had and it was on sale. I went from the EVGA GeForce 9800 GT with 512 DDR3 to the PNY GeForce 9800 GT with 1024 DDR3. Odd thing is, it is a smaller sized card and requires no 6-pin power connector. No complaints on a lower power card as long as it works.

 

[raiyus13]

I'm Glad you fixed it, enjoy your new card

 

[alhanelem]

if the pny 9800 gt doesnt need a 6 pin , then maybe its the green version one.
which means its clocked slower so you might get lower perf. on games