Nvidia card going crazy?

My graphics card is a Nvidia Geforce GT 520 and it's less then a year old. Shortly after I got it I started getting weird pixalated squares of color on my screen randomly, and they come and go but get worse when I'm playing games. But lately it's been worse and laggy, and now some games like Skyrim have been getting graphics problems and lag they never had before. Like recently Skyrim and the creation kit have been getting texture "Spikes" that spike off of and jerk around, from objects in the game. What do I do?

 

Greetings, xxdarkwolfrosexx...

Looks like your video card may be displaying something called artefacts, which is a term usually associated with overclocking.

If you are in fact overclocking your machine, you might consider resetting to defaults to see if you can produce a change in symptoms. If you are not intentionally overclocking, then boot your machine into BIOS and reset everything to safe defaults to see if you can produce a change in symptoms.

You might also consider uninstalling your video driver software and reinstalling the latest driver version to see if that clears anything.

 

The bios were at optimized default already, so I'll try to reinstall the drivers. I don't have a cd or anything, so once i uninstall will i be able to just download the driver to reinstall?

 

No luck, my bios were on default optimized and I uninstalled then reinstalled nvidia and no luck. I'm not gonna have a choice but to buy a new one and throw this one away, hunh?
Here's a pic I just took of the pixels and the spikes. Do you think the spikes in skyrim are the same cause? Nobody else has had them and they're my biggest problem.
http://i1093.photobucket.com/albums/i424/blackthorrn/ScreenShot4.jpg
http://i1093.photobucket.com/albums/i424/blackthorrn/Artefacts.png

 

I'm not sure why my reply's are not showing up, is this site broken?

 

Everything seems to be working fine here. If you are using the problem machine in question, try booting into Safe Mode w/Networking to try to post.

 

It took awhile for them to show up and the posts were out of order, seems fine now. But, since I did everything do you think all I can do now is ask nvidia to replace the card, or just buy a new one?

 

I apologize, but I haven't played Skyrim so I can't recommend any settings. I do advise exploring any graphics settings within the game and possibly throttling down to see if you can get a change in symptoms. Same applies to any nVidia control panel that might be present on your machine.

Barring that: is there any way you can install the GT 520 in another computer to see if you can duplicate the symptoms? Or, the reverse: mount another card in your machine (or switch to onboard graphics if available) to see if you can pick up on anything?

And, be patient: there are good hardware people here - others may join this thread with some better ideas.