[Gormless_Git]

Yesterday, whilst playing COD4, my computer suddenly froze (still don't know why). After re-booting the pc, everything seemed normal, until it crashed again, but this time with red dotted lines sprawled across the screen.

I rebooted the PC, and my first thought was to run my anti virus (AVG) to check for anything unusual.

Half way through the scan, we had a power cut. When the power came back on, everything still seemed normal on the PC, so I ran the virus scan again.

Whilst this was running in the background, I was surfing the web, when suddenly tiny red dots started to reapear and flash up on different parts of the screen. Then before I knew it, the whole screen had red lines across it, and the PC crashed again.

After another reboot, I was met with a BSD! But it was gone before I could get the code...

I rebooted into safe mode, but was still met with the red lines across the screen. (this leads me to suspect it could be a physical problem with a component...) I ran the anti virus again overnight, and it came up with nothing.

I reckoned it must have been a driver issue with my graphics card, so I uninstalled the driver, and installed an earlier version. However, when I rebooted into normal windows, it would crash and hang on a black screen before the logon page had loaded.

So back into safe mode I went, but dispite the driver change, there were still red lines!!!

I tried a system restore to 2 days earlier when there werent any problems, but it still wouldn't boot into windows normally, and still had red lines!

I have tried doing a check disk, but that hasnt fixed it either.

Using my anti-static leash and mat, I cleaned the dust build up from my graphics card to see if that was the problem, but this didn't change anything.

I have checked my connections from GPU to Monitor, and they are fine.

I'm starting to run out of ideas, and wondered if any of you could help. Other people online have had similar problems, but have solved them in different ways.

I cant try changing the screen speed of the GPU from 60Hz to 70Hz, as someone did, as the nVidia control pannel cannot be accessed in safe mode.

Worryingly, the red lines show up during the bios loading sequence, which is really bizzarre, and worries me further that it may be physical damage to the GPU causing this.

The only other clue I can leave you to go on, is that a day prior to the crash, I connected a second monitor to my GPU. It worked fine, but as this was the only thing I changed with the GPU prior to the crash, I wondered if it bore any significance...

See what you, think and if any of you have an idea, I would welcome it hugely! As of now, I feel like putting my foot through the PC...

MOBO: Asus Striker Extreme
CPU: Intel Core 2 duo E6600
GPU: Asus EN8800GTX 768mb
RAM: DDR2 Corsair Dominator 2Gb (can't remember which model)
Screen: Samsung SyncMaster 206BW (1680x1050) via DVI (-D..?)

[Rollin' Rog]

This absolutely sounds like a display card issue -- not the drivers, but the card itself. Check for warranty support -- most are good for 3 years.

If you are using multiple cards -- test one at a time and disable SLI in the BIOS

Make sure nothing is overclocked !

Does booting in VGA mode make any difference (I doubt it will, but try it).