Yeah, I was trying to convince myself it was merely a driver issue. It's funny, with the symptoms, it really could go either way. The strange things for me are the following: 1) It's been fine for weeks - no problems at all. This is a recent issue, and nothing has changed either software-wise or hardware-wise. 2) Temperatures didn't seem to have a great deal to do with it. Artifacting was present at all times under Windows 8, and never under Windows 7 (safe mode). Win 7, booted *with* video drivers artifacted and crashed fairly predictably. Furmark at 450MHz (battery) was reasonably stable, though artifacting. Furmark at 850MHz resulted in a grey screen with lines after seconds. I always monitor temps, and artifacting and crashing occurred as low as 40ish C. 3) The crashes seemed to correlate with the step up to 850MHz (running on battery at 450MHz presented minor artifacting but no crashes). Of course, correlation doesn't imply causation; there are other factors involved in the step up, including a voltage increase. Anyway, today I was going to re-seat the card and figured while I was at it I'd replace the thermal pads and repaste the GPU. I noticed the inductors on the board don't look to be of the highest quality. Infact, one has a chip off the corner. For all I know this could be within spec; I'm no expert, but they appear to be ferrite, which is notorously fragile. Nonetheless it's concerning. Anyway, after repasting and starting up again, I'm idling at ~29C (which is probably 10 above ambient), and Furmark at 1920*1080 ran for as long as I had the patience to run it (about 5 minutes). The moral of the story (for me, anyway) is not to be lazy about taking it apart and getting into it. I could've saved hours had I followed my instincts and repasted/reseated in the first place, rather than messing around with a new Windows installation and about 35 different driver installs. The next step for me is to flash an undervolted vbios (probably 0.975) to get temps down as far as possible under load. Cheers to everybody here; this place truly is a font of knowledge!
