[Solved] What went wrong with my graphics card?

Okay so here's the rundown on what happened. I bought a computer from CyberpowerPC (I know). I'd heard all the bad things of course, but did it anyway since I had plenty of help and am totally clueless about how to build a computer otherwise.

Anyway, I got the PC and everything worked amazingly. I got it two days before skyrim released so as soon as it came out I loaded it up and played the everliving heck out of it on maxxed out settings without even the slightest hint of lag, while also still playing World of Warcraft and City of Heroes.

All was well for about a month, then I started randomly getting the dreaded "your display driver has stopped responding and recovered" sometimes using that fancy one word nvdklmag or whatever it's spelled. This only ever seemed to happen while playing World of Warcraft (usually while in a dungeon with lots of things blowing up). City of heroes and Skyrim brought no errors and played normally.

My GPU temp only ever reached 75 maxxed, with skyrim plus mods to enhance graphics even further. So it wasn't temps as far as I know (unless there's a hidden temp somewhere...) since I was using both coretemp and msi afterburner to monitor them. I also never once got this error while playing Skyrim... which baffled me to no end because WoW and just the internet are causing this but not skyrim?

This got worse over the following 1-2 weeks until finally one day as I was playing woW my screen just went totally blank and my monitor tells me it doesn't recognize a display device anymore. I could still hear the sound of the game playing in the background... which baffled me. I had no other choice but to manually shut down the computer... when I restarted everything seemed fine, so I went back into woW and about 5 minutes in it happened again. I shut it down again and restarted with the intention of hitting the internet to figure it out this time, only... as soon as my computer started loading up it was completely filled with horizontal green lines... and when I moused over these lines they'd dissapear and come back when I moved the mouse away. If I tried to let windows start normally it gave instant blue screens, citing that fancy nvdlkmag thing again.

I managed to get into safe mode but the lines were still there. I tried everything I could think of which comprised of searching the internet for small tweaks that cant hurt the system and installing various versions of drivers for my vid card... none of which ever worked and the problem persisted.

I ended up RMAing the computer (I won't type out my horror story that is their horrible excuse for customer service..., to say the least cyberpower customer service is about as helpful as throwing an asthmatic person into a room filled with pollen). I'm due to get it back tommorow, and after much teeth pulling to actually get SOME information on what happened, I was told in their usual vague fashion the following.

"We do apologize for the delay in responding to your request for status. In regards to the items that was changed; it was just the video card going out, with premium part like the GTX 580 the only suggestion would be to shutdown or hibernate just give the hardware time to rest between use.

Hope that helps.

Cyber-tech"

I'm frustrated to say the least... (they didn't even get my name right..)What is this supposed to mean? Did I fry my graphics card from using it too much? Are graphics cards supposed to just "go out" in 1-2 months? Is hybrid sleep not good enough and I should be using hibernate every time I'm done using the computer?

Hopefully one of you can tell me what went wrong... if it was something I did I'd love to not do that again.

Operating System:
Windows 2.6.1.7601 (Service Pack 1)
CPU Type:
Intel® Core™ i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
CPU Speed:
3.62 GHz
System Memory:
7.92 GB
Video Card Model:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
Video Card Memory:
3.97 GB
Video Card Driver:
nvd3dum.dll
Desktop Resolution:
1920x1080
Hard Disk Size:
931.41 GB
Hard Disk Free Space:
813.41 GB (87%)
Download Speed:
2.99 kB/s (24.5 kbps)

PSU is a corsair 850w txV2
dunno what the motherboard is but it's a gigabyte.. don't have the pc back yet.

Any idea what caused it?

Forgive me for my stupid questions but why would it work for a month or two if it was faulty?

might just be a bad card that died very fast from stress. Sometimes cards are just bad.

Best answer selected by helplessgamergirl.