Last night whilst I was preparing Dominator for installing Windows 2000 a strange square appeared on the desktop, upon moving my cursor over it, it vanished.
Moments later some strange bars appeared at the top of the screen, same deal, moving the cursor or a window to the affected area made it disappear temporarily.
However, 3-4 minutes later, this happened
Total chaos!
After a bit of probing around, I was able to locate the culprit, a bad VRAM chip.
Even just touching the IC was enough to cause screen garbage.
After cleaning and heating to try and reflow any bad joints, it will wasn't enough to bring the card back to working status.
So now I need to go on the hunt for another good, clean one.
On the other hand, I was able to clean up a GTX280 and remove the awful sticker that Gainward stuck on, and they didn't even do that properly.
After liberal applications of adhesive remover, Isopropyl and a scraping tool.
So now I have a lovely-looking nVidia reference board.