I started seeing weird lines & dots on my MONITOR about 24 hours ago,
I haven't seen anything like it before and want to know what this is and is it bad?


VIEW in full resolution:  http://i.imgur.com/9AoTS.png
lines like this pop up often, even when I'm typing this right now. every time the screen is refreshed it'll pop up.

A really bad one:

http://i.imgur.com/9AoTS.png

I first saw it when watching anime using VLC media player, weird lines popped up and flickered all over as the video played.

System Info:
Windows Vista x64 Home Premium
Intel i7 920 2.8 GHz Quad w/ HT (8 Cpus in task MANAGER)
MSI X58 Platinum SLI mobo
MSI Twin Frozr nVidia GTX 560 Ti graphics
Corsair XM3 DDR3-1600 12 GB (6x2GB)
Corsair TX-850 850W PSU
Corsair 800D case
Seagate Barracuda SATAII 1.5 TB primary hard drive
ASUS VW266H 25.5" LCD 1920x1200 monitor.

Using Norton Internet Security 2012 - no threats detected
Windows is up to date, windows update ran on Sunday.
Graphics drivers up to date.
Computer is on APC-brand 1000 VA UPS (primarily used as line conditioner/surge/brownout/etc) the UPS is protected by a surge protector.
Monitor is about 2 years old now.

I haven't turned off the system since it started happening- I still have the system temps recorded and I don't see anything unusual (excessive temps)

As you can see it's still happening as I did the screenshot (best of 5 tries)

Can someone tell me what's going on?

thanks in advanceIf the lines are occurring in your screenshots, which are dumps of your graphics card memory, it's possible that your card is going bad.

Try taking out your GTX 560 Ti and running with your onboard graphics. See if the problem persists. If not, plug your GTX 560 Ti back in and run Video Memory Test:
http://majorgeeks.com/Video_Memory_Stress_Test__d5896.html 
See if it reports any errors.I ran the stress test for less than 3 minutes... 14336 errors.
that's not good, is it?


My motherboard does not have onboard graphics, nor do I have any other PCI-e graphics card lying around. I do have a PCI graphics card - nVidia Riva 128 (from 1997) - I doubt it'll be of any use.

I just NOTICED- the weird lines are gone! ?? come to think of it, none has appeared since i ran Video Memory Stress Test utility!

I'm running a full test now...

What else can I do to troubleshoot?

:edit:
full test done. results are in:
The Video Memory is failing. Is either the GPU itself or it's memory overclocked?


it's all factory, I haven't changed anything with the graphics card.

I think it's still under warranty...

the graphics card will still work for a while longer, right? it wouldn't just *break* if I restart the computer? The GPU core is evidently still working, but I suggest you make use of the warranty. When did it start to fail and what were the first symptoms? Did it occur abruptly after a reboot? No the graphics card won't just fail if you reboot your computer now, only some of the VRAM NAND chips are faulty.