Computer dead ...

[[AK]Abaddon]

I'm guessing my video or north bridge has fried ... last night I suddenly got flashing textures and screen garbling in a 3D game (EVE Online). The computer then locked up and went into power save mode. When I reboot, the flashing textures occur in Windows as well, and cause a lockup within a couple of minutes. I updated my video drivers just in case, but the problem persists.

Edit: When I boot into Safe Mode, everything is stable. When I do a normal boot, I cannot even get to Windows anymore ... just get flashing lines on the screen.

Suspicions:

Video card fried (It is an 8800GTS and has always run scarily hot -- 64 C at idle, up into the 80s running). Edit: This is looking most likely. I'm getting vertical flashing lines across the screen at BIOS stage of startup all the way into Windows. I uninstalled and reinstalled my video drivers, and now Windows acknowledges the card on startup (and installs drivers) but inside Windows the card is invisible. The Nvidia Control panel will not display and it seems my computer's video is running on default drivers (and there are no flashing textures). My guess is that the higher-level functions on my video card are toast. Could still be the North Bridge too, I suppose.

CPU Cooler may have pulled away from the MB enough that it is not cooling effectively (Seems to be okay, but have not pulled it and reapplied compound). It is a large, heavy heat sink, so this could be the issue.

Passive cooling on North Bridge or MOSFETS may have pulled away from MB (Or just was not effective enough over time -- it still seems to be firmly attached).

I do not have any extra components on hand for testing, so it looks like it's going back to the local shop that built it two years ago, to get the problem sorted out.

ASUS P5N32E-SLI
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 (2.4 GhZ)
eVGA Nvidia 8800 GTS
2 GB Mushkin DDR2800 memory
650W ThermalTake Power Supply
500 GB WD SATA HD
Windows Vista 64 Home Basic