My friend has had his Gigabyte Geforce 6800GT for about 3 years now. The card suddenly began displaying artifacts and under windows it says it cannot detect the card. I installed it into another computer with the same artifact result, but this time it detected the card installed the drivers but when xp launches now it gives a blank screen. I personally think the card is fried because it has a passive heatsink on it. The fan is on the back of the processor doing jack with a heat pipeline leading to the other side where the processor is.

SO was it the memory or the processor that went?

must of been the GeForce I reckon those cards are known to have lower quallity parts than card of 3dfx, ATi as Matrox.

Maybe bad memory or leaking capacitors on that GeForce?
You could also try and find if there are loose components on it or try and flash it with a new bios ;)

It could also be something in your PC as well try the system with another VGA card a V3 3000 PCI or a simple AGP card for instance :)

I plopped in a pci card and it booted fine. The Geforce card gives the same artifacts in every machine I tried it in.
Oh well, itll make a nice belt buckle

hmm okay strange how hardware can just fail within a sudden moment  :-/ you could try to flash the card with another bios and hope that that might change the situation

wrote on 28.04.07 at 11:20:56:

try to flash the card with another bios and hope that that might change the situation

+1....asus had a 6800 with ddr3 mem. If you flash it's bios 4 pipes will shut down plus a vertex. Assuming that artifact are coming from a damaged pipe and assuming (too many assumes I know...1 in a million but worths a shot) this will be in the 4 that will be disabled, you might get it to work properly.

hmmmmm... sounds like its worth it. But where can I find the bios? I Forgot to mention  a crucial peice of info. When my ffriend started getting artifacts, the dumb shmuck kept the machine running. He kept his computer constantly running all summer long. So whatever started getting cooked ended up getting well done.

http://www.mvktech.net/

I am very new to the whole bios flashing thing. Which asus 6800 bios will work?

http://www.mvktech.net/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,selectfolder/cat,61/page,3/

open them with nibitor and spot the one with ddr3 timings....make sure memory size is ok and flash it with nvflash.

After i decreased the speed to 2x mode amazingly the card booted and installed without visual errors. I went to direct X to test it
The card passed dx 7 and 8 but gave errors on 9. Then began the graphical errors once again. There still may be hope..... Too bad I lack a power supply over 250 watts.....