GTS 450 Issues

[Fuzzykins]

Got home from school and went immediately to MMO-Champion. A lot of things were discolored, and random windows of black with grey kept popping up on screen. I exited out, rebooted, all that good stuff, and checked out World of Warcraft. The models were incredibly distorted and they'd get artifacts and lines heading from the models at the login screen. I was getting small pink pixels on my desktop.
I turned my computer off and inspected the graphics card. There are no outward signs of damage, so I took a closer look. It wasn't running particularly hot, it was just failing straight out. Eventually it quit loading graphics at all, so I fell back on the Integrated Graphics that I have.
I'd like a second opinion on what's wrong.
So far I've deduced that the Graphics Card is failing, and I don't know the reason. Power supply was adequate, drivers were up to date and then rolled back to check driver issues. Anything else?

[Xuvial]

Oh Fuzzy what did you do >_>

You've pretty much answered every possibility yourself there. Time to RMA it if it's still within that period.

The only other possibility is that your PSU's pci power connectors went berserk and overloaded the GPU, but I reeeeeeally doubt that happened.

[Fuzzykins]

I sort of thought it might have been the power connectors too, so I used the other 6 pin PCI-E and it was still failing.
>.< I'm annoyed. Curse integrated graphics.
I'm talking on live tech support right now. I'm firmly convinced I know more about the GPU than the male I'm talking to does. :S

"My drivers are up to date."
"Try downloading the latest drivers from <insert link here>"
Guh..

[Enola]

You probably overclocked it too much, I got the same issue with my old 460se when I went above 1Ghz and memories above 2200, I'm not sure what exactly went wrong but probably the memory chips got too hot (artifacts usually memory), maybe vrm, either way one of the things I didn't like with this Nvidia board was the lack of mem and vrm temp sensors. That said I was lucky enough to after a few days the problem just disappeared and the board started working normally again.

[Saithes]

Usually if it artifacts on stock clocks its the vram or voltage regulators. Try underclocking it a little bit like 100MHz on the core and memory from stock and see if it still does it. If it does, then the card is most likely done for.

[Biggiej]

A friend of mine had issues with his gfx card today during BFBC2 I think he has a gt 280 or something I am at a loss of which model exactly, but apparently he thinks a driver issue caused it.

[Xuvial]

Now you got me worried whether I should keep my GTX580 at 900mhz core @1.1v -_-
DirectCU keeps it at ~78c fully loaded (stable), but that's only during synthetic benches like Heaven or Kombustor. During Crysis or BFBC2 it hovers around 70-74c.

[Saithes]

Now you got me worried whether I should keep my GTX580 at 900mhz core @1.1v -_-
DirectCU keeps it at ~78c fully loaded (stable), but that's only during synthetic benches like Heaven or Kombustor. During Crysis or BFBC2 it hovers around 70-74c.

You're fine I'm pretty sure.. I don't think the GTS 450's have memory or VRM heatsinks.

[Fuzzykins]

There's a dried liquid on the PCB of my video card that I didn't notice before. Nothing's ever been dropped on the case, and it came straight out of the package, into my tower, and I closed the thing up. I thought it might be thermal grease form the manufacturing plant, but I'd like a second opinion on this too.

[Saithes]

There's a dried liquid on the PCB of my video card that I didn't notice before. Nothing's ever been dropped on the case, and it came straight out of the package, into my tower, and I closed the thing up. I thought it might be thermal grease form the manufacturing plant, but I'd like a second opinion on this too.

If its a silver/whitish looking its probably manufacturing flux.

[Fuzzykins]

If its a silver/whitish looking its probably manufacturing flux.

'tis the same color as the PCB, but it's a matte black, as opposed to the sheen (lol) of the PCB.
For the record, my 450 has been very heavily overclocked, as well. It was stable when I oc'd it and I made sure it wasn't overheating, so I don't see why that would cause an issue. I released the overclock settings, and went back to defaults, and it didn't fix it immediately.
It is now working just fine, however. Meh.

[Xuvial]

Wait so now it's fine o_O
That is worrying because it's acting unpredictably

[Fuzzykins]

Wait so now it's fine o_O
That is worrying because it's acting unpredictably

Yeah, that's the weird thing... It's been a bit finicky lately. I got a really low period of awful framerates, restarted, and it was fine for about 2 weeks.