570GTX fine without drivers, artifacts+crash when logging into windows

[Celesty]

I've had this card for about 3 months and it's been working fine, load temps always seemed to be really low in this setup at about 40-50°C.

Today I tried to start up a game and got a black screen, rebooted and everything looked fine until the windows 7 login screen, when I try to log in the system hangs, then displays red and blue artifacts all over the screen and the system stops responding.

Safe mode works fine without artifacts, logging in without nvidia drivers works fine, but as soon as I install ANY drivers, I get the same hang and artifacts when I try logging into the account.

Does this mean the card is dead? What do I do?

 

[Celesty]

with older drivers I get a black screen crash between "windows is start" and the login screen, new drivers give artifacts after trying to log in

 

[nocturnae]

if you have it only 3 months (and it was a newly bought card) I would just return it. Artifacts are mostly an indicator that your card is broken.