>> Surely that's a rather rare failure mode on a graphics card?
> 
> About the same as getting some bad RAM bits in your normal PC RAM probably.

Well, you'd think. ;-)

I've bought brand new RAM sticks to find that they're defective, and 
I've occasionally damaged one inserting or removing it, but never seen 
one just fail during normal use. They seem to be quite reliable.

> I had the RAM in my desktop machine at work partially fail after some 
> time. It started when dealing with big zip files, it would complain that 
> the CRC check didn't match up, even though I had just downloaded it.  
> Then it would blue-screen randomly, and gradually got more frequent.  I 
> did the memcheck86 or whatever it was and there was an area of RAM that 
> was totally corrupt, it's a wonder Windows even booted, let alone worked 
> normally most of the time.  Replaced the RAM and very reliable now.

Yeah, RAM failures cause weird crap to happen. Depending on where in RAM 
the problem is, it often only causes problems when you try to do certain 
things. (But what with virtual memory, it's quite hard to predict when 
it will or won't show up a problem.) Diagnosing RAM faults without a 
real RAM tester is just Not Fun...

> I had the same with my nVidia Ti4200 graphics card, actually identical 
> symptoms to you, random triangles flickering across the screen.  
> Gradually got worse over time, and also while playing a game until it 
> crashed.  Tried it in my sisters PC and the same symptoms.  I didn't 
> bother trying to figure out the cause, but just assumed it was bad RAM.

Well, since the RAM isn't replaceable on a graphics card, I guess it 
really just boils down to "does this graphics card work properly or not?"

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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