Do i have a failing graphics card?

[Jacob Jagielski]

I have been getting some graphical glitches like a Blue box that keeps flashing in MGS 5 ground zeroes and a black thing that appears on the bottom of my screen ever second in Skyrim. I have a HD 7850, it reaches 86C playing some games but never goes past 88C. UPDATE: i lowered the resolution in MGS 5 and the blue box went away, but i still would like to play in 1920x1080.

 

[jaguarskx]

From my experience it could be anything... Try updating the drivers or roll it back to an older driver version. You may need to re-install the game or re-install Windows and the game. I've had issues where one of those steps fixed graphics issues I was having. It could also be graphic mods that you are using, so you may want to start a new game without using any mods at all to see if you have the same issue before doing anything else.

In the most bizarre situation the nVidia GT 550m in my Lenovo IdeaPad Y470 started to fail about 9 months after the warranty ended. Nothing I tried fixed the problem. I would even turn on my laptop, leave it alone and the laptop would BSOD (blue screen of death) within 15 - 30 minutes. However, if I did not install the nVidia driver (any version) the laptop would be perfectly stable where I can use it to encoded video files for over 40 hours straight. I wrote off the nVidia GT 550m as completely dead; that was late 2013.

About 3 months ago I wanted to do a clean install of Windows 7 because I was considering giving it away my Y470 to charity at the end of this year. The plan was to do a clean install, update it and create an image so when I am ready to give away the laptop I just need to restore the backup image and install whatever Windows 7 updates there are. But I ran into problems...

Like all laptops, the Y470 has a recover partition in case people want to reinstall the OS. But this time I could not access my recovery partition and I could not reinstall Windows 7. I whipped out my retail DVD of Windows 7 Home Premium which I bought for my desktop, and used that to re-install Windows using the product key on the underside of my laptop. What the hell... I decided to install a copy of nVidia drivers I had saved on the D: drive. To my surprise the nVidia GT 550m worked flawlessly. I installed the base game of Skyrim, play it for about 1 hour and left my character stand around for about 14 hours while I did other things. (went out with friends, came back home, went to sleep, etc.). When I checked the laptop the next day the game was still running.

Conclusion.... It was Lenovo's Windows 7 image that was causing the BSOD problems with the nVidia GT 550m. I never would have figured that out if the recover partition allowed me to reinstall Windows 7.