Hello everyone.
Today my graphics card (XFX 6600GT PCI-E) has been showing up artifacts when playing games. It started whilst playing the free trial of eve online (which i was running all of yesterday with no problems). These artifacts appeared while playing Eve, Battlefield 2 and CS:Source.
There are no artifacts when on the desktop or running any 2D apps (I tried playing Red Alert 2, and no problems). I also tried the Direct3D test in DXDiag, and there were no artifacts there either. I tried updating the drivers from nVidia to no avail.
At first I thought part of my graphics card was fried, but I had to go out for a few hours so I tried leaving it off for a bit. When I came back I managed to run CS:Source for about 2 minutes before they appeared again which made me think it was a temperature issue. So I ran CS in a window with the nVidia temperature monitor open. The temperature was generally just above 70°C but once strayed up to 80°C, now correct me if I'm wrong but I thought this is within normal operating temperatures for a GPU. This card is a year old now, and I had been playing games through that heatwave last week with no problems.
Anybody who's clued in got any ideas as to how I can solve this problem (without getting a replacement - it's out of its year's warranty). I've included a quick screenshot of CS with the artifacts if that helps at all.
Thanks in advance.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/chrisabbott/untitled.JPG