Artifacts on boot, BSOD... Geforce 9800GTX+ quiet a pickle ?!

I cant believe it, after struggling 1 month researching which GPU im getting since i live in a place where it isnt easy to get acess to such technologies, and i upgrade my GPU every 3-4 years. After all i picked Geforce 9800GTX+ from Gainward. I even upgraded my PSU for it.

The second i plugged it in, downloaded new drivers, installed them , everything worked fine until i got a Blue Screen after 3-4 hours of using it. After that, some artifacts ( blue lines ) started showing up at my boot screen ONLY. Safe mode, bios screen and the desktop show fine, but driver is always disabled automatically, cant enter games, aero is disabled and everything. So i decided to completly format, install windows vista again, upgrade everything (SP1), no more artifacts until i installed drivers and got Blue screen again ! Keep in mind bluescreen happens only once and then drivers just keep on being disabled. I thought it was a driver/software problem, it even menitoned the old nvlddmkm.sys problem, so i dont really care about Vista, i installed windows xp, and the artifacts were there on the XP first time boot screen, before the desktop even loaded I installed drivers and everything nothing helped.

Right now i am completly lost !
If its the hardware, then why arent I getting artifacts on Desktop or Safemode or Bios Screen ?
If it was software, then how did i get artifacts on Windows Xp boot screen before the desktop even loaded ? Specially after a full HD format ?

Its quiet a pickle i say, again, requesting an RMA would be really hard for me, therefore im leaving that as a last choice. Any help would be appreciated and sorry for the big wall of text !
I hope i posted in the right section of the forums.
Thanks in Advance.
Mark

My system:
INTEL Model D946GZIS
Intel® Core™2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz
4.00 GB RAM
32-bit operating system
Geforce 9800GTX+ Gainward

 

is that a new build? if yes, try another card (perhaps the integrated card if you have one) and see how that works to rule out that other HW or SW parts of your system might be faulty. Next thing is, try to use the driver on the supplied driver CD and/or all other available drivers for this card to see if at least one of them works. That's all I can suggest for now.

or try to put it into another PC...

 

my pc is 1 year old, the card is new. ill try to do that with drivers, although it is strange because now im getting the artifacts before even installing any driver. the problem is i cant try it on another pc :S