Weird proglem with BIOS and/or GPU

[plezmo]

So the story goes like this: my PC froze a couple of days back. After a reboot when I get to the Windows user profile screen it shows a mess of colors for about 5 minutes then restarts.
In safe mode it boots fine , and I even got it to work by picking boot from last safe state , but then it recognizes my graphics card (GeForce 8500) as new hardware. So when I install the video drivers and the PC reboots its the same stuff all over again. It runs almost normally if I dont install the "new" hardware , but no openGL or anything.

Also the words in my BIOS are all messed up. Letters are replaced with wrong ones. For instance it says Dask instead of Disk and Wigdows PP and so on.
Is this a case of a corrupted BIOS or a malfunctionig graphics card, and what should I do?
Help me , please I have exams coming up and I really need that PC...

 

[jdenova007]

Could be a bad motherboard or a bad GPU... GPU is easier to replace. I would try that first.

 

[ansonjoy007]

When you get artifacts in the bios , it's a direct hardware incompatibility or malfunction. If a bios update on the motherboard doesn't fix it , then most likely it's the gpu itself.

 

[plezmo]

Ok it seems to be an overheat problem , or so I think.
Started the system yesterday after it hadn't worked for about 12 hours. BIOS looked fine , no messed up letters and what-not. Removed one of the panels of the case for better cooling. After 25 minutes the GPU was so hot I couldn't touch it for more than a few secs.
So seeing how its an older , low class graphics card and it only has passive cooling what are my options?

 

[amuffin]

get hw monitor and tell us the temps.

 

[plezmo]

It shows 95 C (202 F) atm Im streaming live TV

 

[amuffin]

It shows 95 C (202 F) atm Im streaming live TV

that is over heating, clean the card out with compressed air.