I've had an EVGA GTX 570 for just over three years and last night, ironically, as I was about to exit out of a game and shut down my system, my mouse pointer showed a series of lines under it and then suddenly my computer just rebooted itself. My BIOS splash screen then showed a series of white lines across it and when I chose to boot into Windows 7 Pro (64-bit), I heard what sounded like a jet engine going off in my case as it was booting. It also was only loading on my old LCD monitor that's running on a DVI connection (I have a dual monitor setup, with my second monitor (a newer LED) running off the HDMI port). When I went to check the nVidia panel, it failed to actually detect the LCD monitor (when I tried to choose the detect option, nothing happened) and wasn't seeing the LED. I also was stuck at a very low 800x600 resolution. At the time, I thought maybe the card was running hot and maybe just needed to rest/cool off for a bit.
However, when I booted up this system tonight (it had been off all day), I saw the same white lines/dots across the BIOS splash and same behavior in Windows 7 (complete with the jet engine fan noise). I also have tried booting into my Linux distro (my system is set up to dual boot between the two) to check to see if I was having any issues with it there or if it may have been just a Windows/driver issue. All I got was a plain, black screen. However, I admittedly suspected already it was more likely to be a hardware issue given what I saw of the BIOS splash--plus, when hooking the monitor cable up to the onboard video, I had no trouble getting into Linux. However, the onboard video is definitely not up to the task for what I normally need/do with that system.
Regardless, Windows (not surprisingly?) appears not to be detecting my 570 or any video card (all the options in the properties panel show up either as "unavailable" or "N/A") just as the nVidia panel (which finally showed up) is claiming it's not detecting a nVidia GPU. I have thought about uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers, but if it's having issues with Linux as well and I'm assuming is what's causing the graphical issue with my BIOS splash, I have to wonder if that would even help or not?
However, if my card has gone south on me, how is it I'm still able to get into what appears to be the VGA settings in Windows? I also don't understand what may have happened as the card is only three years old and I've never overclocked it. I suppose part of that may also come from the fact that the last EVGA card I bought (a now-"ancient" Geforce 6800GT) still runs just as well as it did when I got it.
I mostly just want to know if my card is basically a goner and am I going to have to replace it (especially as, go figure, the warranty on it just expired) with something else? Or could something else be going on with this system and causing this?
Again, given my past experience with EVGA I assumed I'd have to eventually replace my card when Adobe changed its requirements for the software I rely on long before I'd need to replace it due to an issue with the card, itself.