Hardware lurkers - help me find a new video card!

[Kevin]

Update on this, because I am getting terribly frustrated.

Here's a recap:

I started experiencing short bursts of black screens while 3D gaming, followed by a notice of “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered”. After that, my cursor displays artifacts until I reboot. This problem still exists despite everything I have done to fix it.

Here's what I have done:

• Uninstalled/re-installed video drivers. Many times.
  
• Removed my old ATI 4890 videocard and installed a new ATI 6770 videocard.
  
• Installed a new case fan to provide more cooling.
  
• Replaced my 500w PSU with a 700w PSU.
  
• Upgraded my 32-bit Windows XP to 32-bit Windows 8. I didn't do a complete reformat/reinstall - just an upgrade.
  
• Ran Memtest86 to see if my RAM was bad. Memtest86 found no problems after a few passes.
  

My next course of action is to install Windows 8 64-bit after formatting. I really should have done that instead of messing with Win8 32-bit in the first place. After this, I'm really out of ideas. It might be possible that my new ATI 6770 really is faulty, but I'm not sure how to positively check that.

Do you have another PCIE x16 slot on the board to put the card in (i.e. is it an SLI ready board), if so, swap slots.

At a quick glance at the steps it looks like you have isolated it to video card or somewhere else on the motherboard. If it's still using old school capacitors they can get flaky and generally it only shows up under load.