Computer's Graphics Card done for?

[Baeo]

Hello fellow forum users!

In recent times, my computer has started bugging out (again) whenever I play just about any game. After a while, the screen will flash, then a screen with (usually a certain color) stripes going down it will appear, and my computer will freeze.

This is a picture of the stripe things:

http://i.imgur.com/Ma6g1.jpg

Also, here are my computer's specs:
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Service Pack 1, 64 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 5
Processor Count: 8
RAM: 6134 Mb
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5900 Series (5970 I believe), 1024 Mb
Hard Drives: C: Total - 610375 MB, Free - 378665 MB;
Motherboard: Alienware, 0H869M


I'm speculating it has something to do with a faulty or corrupted video card, but I wanted some other opinions before taking action. If anyone knows what this is all about, that'd be great!

Thanks for your time!
-Baeo

 

[Wildcard]

Hello,

This could be the video card giving errors, or it might be caused by something else as well. First, do you have another video card you could swap this one out with to see if the problem returns? If not, do you have onboard video on the motherboard you could try using? Also, I would test the RAM on the computer as ram can cause all sorts of strange lockups, crashes, and reboots on a computer. Windows 7 has a built in memory test I believe. You could try running that for a few hours to see if it gives an errors or not. I would also run a checkdisk on your hard drive to see if there are any bad sectors being reported on it, as this could cause lockups as well.