Artifacts in bios

[Tolklein]

Greetings all,

While I was busy on my PC, the screen went totally blank, I restarted and little red dots appeared during boot up, my PC gives me a BSOD before Vista will load and restarts, the dots are in the bios too. So i figured it's my 8600 GTS showing its age. But when I boot into Safe mode, everything seems fine, as in no artifacts or BSOD.

I suppose swapping out the Card is the only way to really test if it is in fact the GFX card, but the Safe mode thing left me puzzled though.

So my question, for now, could it be anything else.

Thanks

[boeppens]

When booting into safe mode, Windows uses its own driver for gfx. Could be a driver problem

[Tolklein]

Power

[Stuart]

Sounds like reasonably sound troubleshooting to me.

[DeeVeeDee]

When booting into safe mode, Windows uses its own driver for gfx. Could be a driver problem

It happens in the BIOS aswell and this is before drivers are loaded.
In safe mode its probably not touching the "Problematic part" or advanced functions which causes the card to accelerate what ever is thrown at it.
Since its using generic VGA drivers
It could also be that the dots are not active in a certain resolution.

Its doing the same in a different PC, and you are already considering replacing it.
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/ is a bunch of firmares you can try hopefully you can update it whilst in safemode.
Its probably a short longshot but it could fix it maybe its firmare went corrupt.

[Tolklein]

Cool, will give the BIOS update a try, what could possibly go wrong.