Bizzarre Screen "Artifacts", unable to boot

Ok, Let me preface this by saying that I'm fairly savvy when it comes to technology. I've done my share of reformats, had viruses (that I've fixed). However, This issue has me stumped. Completely and utterly.

I was playing EVE online yesterday morning, and decided I wanted to see how far my machine could go with forced settings in the Nvidia Control Panel. It crashed after a few minutes and I thought 'Well, thats the limit. I'll turn them down to where they were.' I did, everything worked fine, and I shut the computer off.

Last night, however, I went to boot up the machine and During the initial dell loading screen (the BIOS load screen), There were wierd color glitches all over the place. After this, During the Nvidia RAID controller load screen, there were DOS charecters occuring at random intervals on the screen, interrupting the actual text (and these charecters werent normal charecters, one looked like the Delta symbol).

After Windows began to load (again, with bizarre color glitches), I would get a BSOD attributing the error to nvlddmkm.sys and it was conducting a physical memory dump. It would restart, go into system repair, wouldn't repair, and the loop would continue.

I COULD get into safe mode, however. After doing so, I tried uninstalling nvidia drivers, (and again with driver sweeper), and reinstalling. I would get a dialogue saying that Server Stereo wasn't installed properly.


Going into DXdiag told me that the machine no longer recognized the graphics card (all the fields were blank or listed as N/A under the display tab).

I decided to just go balls out and reformat using the XP disc that came with the computer. Again with the DOS charecters, which made navigating the windows setup screens a real pain (I did them by memory, mostly). As I went to bed, the reformat went, and even THAT screen was plagued by these mysterious charecters. It looked like a 1980s computer virus on my machine!

This morning, I awoke, led the windows installer process through what it needed (all the while enduring the color glitches that plagued safe mode). I left for work this morning while the Horribly designed Dell Installing Applications window was flashing. I'm currently still at work, so I can't provide super detailed explanations, but I hope someone can get me a prognosis.


Things on my list to do are:
Reinstall graphics drivers.
Reseat the Graphics Cards.
Reset CMOS.
Test cards on other machine.


If anyone's encountered this problem and a solution, please please PLEASE tell me. It would save me a great deal of stress and chain-smoking.

Is it possible you have 'fried' the graphics card?

How would I obtain the .dmp file? What is a .dmp?

Same thing happened to me in the past. You fried the graphics card or the cable leading to the monitor. My GC was doing the exact same thing. Lucky mine was under warranty still. Sent in got back and it worked fine.. I then also had the problem in the future but had alrdy purchased a new 9800 gx2 got the same fragmented weird colors and symbols on my screen, thought was gc again. took it out put back in my 8800 ready to send in my 9800 now and it was still like that on my main screen only.. changed out my DVI cable and it worked fine.. so first time was the card itself and second was the cable.. but you say you tested the card on other machine.. try changing the cable.

might also be the ram is fried when pushing the machine hence the bsod and nvlddmkm.sys error. try taking out one at a time and see if works.

I would doubt that it's the card, considering that after the graphic expidition it booted up fine, worked and shut down. Would the card really fry itself after the system was working fine and was shut off? If it's the cable I'll be a happy camper. I'll probably go though another 5 cigs before I get home. I'm not calm.

K, Windows installed fine, but I'm still getting issues recognizing the graphics card (again, DX is showing blank fields as the device and driver information for display). After I installed the latest Nvidia drivers, it appears that it doesn't display anything (they are the drivers included with the computer documentaion). Upon reboot, It will display (still with horrible screen issues) the bios loading, the RAID controller loading, and a few seconds of Windows loading before the monitor doesn't recognize the signal.

When I get a chance I'm going to reverse the cards, perhaps only one of them has gone bad?

Sorry to say it but this doesn't sound good at all. Going by all the facts you've stated, at least one of the cards is blown. I knew it by your first post.

Test the cards individually in another machine.

Yeah, thats what I'm afraid of. Happily, I've got other machines that I use for hardware testing, so thats going to be my weekend. If it's both (which I hope to god it isn't), I'm going to get an ati card (because Nvidia's are so damned expensive). Newegg.com - SAPPHIRE 100284L Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card - Desktop Graphics / Video Cards

Anyone have experience with that particular card?