Troubleshooting GPU problem

[lsmf5]

In the last month my gpu has been getting artifacts in games which it previously had none, examples of this are sleeping dogs, diablo 3 and the sort. Wow has not been affected (presumably because it mainly uses CPU power)

The card is factory overclocked, I did try a small increment overclock above this and had no problem, but chose to go back to the default for 24/7 use.

When I checked the gpu fan and headsink it was full of dust so I used compressed air to clean it thoroughly. My idle temp has decreased by 10 degrees as a result to 43 degrees celsius. However, when I ran a furmark 1080p burn-in test it still brought up artifacts, admittedly about 2 minutes later than a run previously done before cleaning around a load temperature of 73 degrees celsius.

I have tried numerous drivers from the ATI site which had worked perfectly previously.

I am currently trying to troubleshoot whether my gpu is failing or whether it is some other issue.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

[demonskies]

completely uninstall all drivers from within safe mode, then reinstall newest drivers after a clean reboot to windows. If that doesnt work try to go back to an older driver doing the same thing with those drivers. Make sure everything is running at default settings to the card. If it doesnt fix the issue take the card out and test in another machine if it continues to have issues in another machine you probably have a failing card, unless of course AMD has realeased some horrible drivers everytime you had a different version installed .