Best Replacement For GeForce 6800 on an XPS Gen5

[faustx]

Hello all,

I've been running a Dell XPS Gen5 for the last 4 years with great success. Nothing has ever gone wrong with the machine...until now.

Lately I've noticed some odd flickering in the screen (bands of pixels start clumping, and then screen interactions get more difficult, and then the screen starts flickering black and normal, black and normal. As far as I can tell this is not a problem with my 24" dell screen which is running perfectly the other 98% of the time. Since the system gets all wonky and then crashes, I'm thinking video card over monitor.

The machine is spec'd like so:

Motherboard Model: DELL 0GC068
Motherboard Chipset: Intel 955X (Glenwood) + ICH7R
Motherboard Slots: 3xPCI, 2xPCI Express x1, 1xPCI Express x4, 1xPCI Express x16
PCI Express Version Supported: v1.0

2GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 6800 256mb

I'm having trouble tracking down a replacement GeForce 6800 and figure that it's worth asking whether anyone knows what else I could for certain plug into this motherboard in case I need to. If you know where to find it at a good price, bonus!

Thanks!

James

 

[faustx]

So an update:

I switched to a 19" monitor, so far no issues. Then I tried VGA out to the 24". Also no issues. This would suggest that my GeForce 6800 is struggling only with HDMI output?

Has anyone heard of such a thing before?