IT Support W1 London

i originally thought it was a memory problem, then i thought that one of my 8800gt’s were defective, but now after all this research im starting to think the board might just outright be defective.

the notorious problem with nvidia 7 series chipsets and video artifacting has plagued my system.

mind you my bios settings are all stock (ram voltage and timings set manually because this board sucks)
the machine would work fine for a while and then start to display green artifacts and lines all over the screen. when it first started, i could make it stop by restarting the pc. after time though, restarting the pc had no effect on the artifacts. more recently, the artifacts will be displayed starting at the POST screen. i can make them go away by loading bios defaults and rebooting however.

after i do that, i will get into windows and mess around for a few minutes and then the artifacts will come back. just now, they actually showed up, disappeared after 3 minutes, everything was fine for 10 minutes (played some video), and then they come back.

i tried running only 2 ram sticks and the system stopped giving artifacts. i ran 3dmark 06 twice with no problems however my second video card was not detected. after a bit of hassle, i got both cards to show up and SLI enabled. upon reboot however, the system was running very sluggish and locked up on me twice. since the bios settings were all auto at this point, i manually set them to what they should be and now XP will hang at the splash screen. safe mode will boot though.

so i went into safe mode and uninstalled all the nvidia drivers thinking its some driver issue thats preventing xp from loading. and when i reboot, boom artifacts are back starting at the post screen. ***!

if anyone knows this board they know it has alot of issues. that being said, i think this board is actually defective. should i RMA it or what?