Is my GTX460 borked?

Hi,

Hoping someone can offer some advice. I have recently built a new PC with the following specs:

i5 2500k @stock | 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 | 1GB EVGA GTX460 @stock | 64GB Corsair M4 SSD | MSI P67A-GD53 (B3) | XFX 650 PSU |Windows 7 Premium

I had been using it without issue for a week when during a game of Deus Ex HR my monitor went into standby and the sound started looping. Eventually it appeared to crash and attempt to reboot. Attempting to reboot was difficult, sometimes it would hang before POST and sometimes it would make it to the windows log in screen.

In the BIOS the display would freeze at random intervals and require a restart. If I leave it alone for a while it boots into Windows fine before crashing again at some point.

I have stress tested my CPU for several hours without a crash and no major temp rises (max 42 degs) and memtest 86+ hasn't detected any errors yet after 4 passes.

The weird thing is.....
After a crash and subsequent reboot I was presented with the recovery screen where you can select safe mode. On this screen it crashed again and the display froze like it did in the BIOS. However, after a few seconds of the freeze I heard the windows 7 log in screen sound play through my speakers. I turned round to look and it was still frozen on the startup/safe mode select screen!

Since then I have noticed that Windows appears to be responsive immediately after the crash (I think this is since I disable automatic restarts for BSOD). I downloaded a minidmp file viewer and the error messages relate to my video card drivers (I have performed several clean installs of the drivers) and looking online I notice that these messages have been linked to hardware issues as well as driver issues (nothing specific for my card though).

Can anyone offer any advice? I am thinking more and more this is a GPU hardware fault but maybe I am missing something e.g. motherboard?

Something els eto note is that last night before the crashes were occuring I would sometimes get a windows message saying it had recovered from a video problem. Then it would crash properly, and also I here a small double click coming from the card immediately before the vcrash.

Long first post I know, but I am tearing my hair out with this one. My fiancee is on holiday with friends this week and NEED to get some quality time on some games! :cry:cry

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

BTW...I ran GPU z with logging enabled whilst playing and also with 3Dmark running and the highest temp recorded was about 65 degs.

At the timestamps in the logs the readings all come up zero just as it crashes.

As part of my testing I have also tried it with only one stick of RAM (and switched them round). I have also rebuilt my PC a couple of times.

 

OK...Ignore the clicking noise. It is coming from my Asus Xonar sound card. I've checked around and apparently that is normal on booting and shutdown.

I have hooked up my old GFX card (256MB memory!) and so far no problems......