Help with random pixels appearing

[gambin0]

Hello, i just built myself a nice little pc.

i7 2600k
4 gig vengeance
Gigabyte mobo
Nvidia 9800GT
ocz agility 3 ssd
ocz 750Watt psu
Windows 7 64bit pro

Everything was fine, then a good friend of mine gave me a 9800GT (i had a 9800xt back in the day i told him, its a pretty old card then, he said nooo you plum and knocked me upside the head and told me nvidia only just got to that number in like 2008, so its pci-e i said, he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich)

Well i installed the card then got some snazzy beta drivers (306.02) and went full steam ahead and downloaded erm steam, had a look at half life 2 (yes hl2, don't bother checking the date of this post, its the 4th of sept 2012) it was all i had sitting around. After enjoying city 17 for a bit, i came out of the game and done a few things but, there it was black and white squares, if i moved the mouse cursor they would flicker but stay in the same place, i then noticed flash video on chrome flickered too.

They are just dots, nothing to be alarmed about my mate protested, im no pc whizz but i know my way round a pc having dabbled here and there, then bam blue screen.

Fast forward 1 week, i have had the card in an out of the machine, testing this then disabling that... Black dots are here to stay, the card warms up a bit. Without the card inside using the i7's hd gfx 300 its flawless, on my 24 lcd it looks the biz, im content with it, my gaming side is console anyways...

I have tried
Drivers old and new, default (WDM) and beta
New Thermal compound on gpu
Tested leads, in this case VGA
Tested various PSU's
Disabled Aero theme
Tested for artefacts using ATi Tool

The thing is i run a game sayy crysis 2, company of patriots or skyrim, the games play spot on and im quite impressed by the quality on this oldie card, but i come out of a game and open a 'My Computer' window and the insect like square box critters appear then after 1-2-3 hours or minutes maybe a B SOD or just a purple screen. I stressed the card with the tool, and no artefacts come up, the card sits at around 45-50 degrees idle, then under load 65-70 with the fan speed to about 80%

Everything and i mean everything is covered, no one on Google knows a remedy, the card worked sweetly in a pc before it was pulled and given to me.

I'm stuck for words bro's if the card is failing why not in the game, just in chrome or worse still opening gpuz.

http://postimage.org/image/5jx1mhd51/
http://postimage.org/image/66w1n4h0h/

 

[triplej]

I had a similar problem with my Zotac GTX 460 1 GB. While I was in games, the screen looked fine. But, while in Windows 7, random pixels would turn green or flicker white/black on the screen. And they would move around or go away if I refreshed the screen or moved the mouse. I actually had RMA'd the card before this for having a bad fan and overheating, and so now I had one that didn't overheat but made these dots. I ended up RMA'ing it again for the dots, to which Zotac replied they found no problem with the card but they would send me a different refurbished model anyway (I tried other video cards and they worked fine). Now the green dots are gone but I have another card with a fan that doesn't work well.

I guess I missed my point! I think it works fine in games but not on the desktop because the screen in the game is refreshing so fast that you don't notice, but in the desktop it isn't refreshing as fast as the game so you do notice the dots. And I don't know if its fixable but it is the video cards fault.