Is my graphics card dying?

[frenchbread]

I've been having computer problems and I'm starting to think my 14 month old Asus GTX 550Ti graphics card is dying on me.

• 
  ■ I've been experiencing momentary freezes where both the sound and image will "freeze" for about 3 seconds then release. Sometimes this happens a few times in a row.
  
  ■ I often get a disappearing mouse, where the mouse cursor is invisible, but I can see icons get highlight as a move my mouse around. Other times the mouse cursor has a glitched or incorrect image.
  
  ■ Lately I've been playing World of Tanks, not a very graphically demanding game. On high settings I normally get 30-40FPS. Lately after playing for about 20 minutes, I will get a brief "freeze" in the loading screen, followed by a drop in FPS (to like 10-15) and laggy play. When I exit out of the game, it is followed by a disappearing mouse.
  
  ■ The only way to fix these issues is to restart the computer which usually doesn't work like it should. I'll hit restart, windows will log out and the screen will go black, but the computer will not restart or shut down. It just sits there until I hit the manual restart button.
  
  ■ All of these issues have occurred at stock/default frequencies (910Mhz/4104Mhz). When I first got the card, I was able to safely overclock to 980+Mhz, now even a slight bump in frequencies (~20Mhz) seems to make these issues happen faster.
  
  ■ Recently I was using some test prep software that is not at all graphically demanding and I had some freezing, the mouse issue, and then Windows notified me of the video driver crash. After the driver reloaded itself, things seemed to go back to normal. However this was about an hour after some gaming. If I just get on and watch Netflix that alone seems to go fine, but it appears maybe stressing the video card hurts it?

Does this sound like my graphics card is dying? Any troubleshooting I could do to try to fix the problem? Any other suggestions?

Thank you in advance.

System information (everything except PSU was purchased in September, 2012):
PSU: Corsair 620HX *(purchased Feb. 2007)
HDDs: 2x7200 RPM Seagate
Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V LK
RAM: 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance @1600
GPU: ASUS ENGTX550 TI DC/DI/1GD5 Nvidia Driver: 331.65
CPU: Intel i5-3570K
Sound Card: ASUS Xonar DG

 

[BradSpray]

Are all the video card drivers up to date?

 

[scout_03]

this board have a onboard video chipset so remove the gpu and try with it only to see if you have the same issue if yes i would look at the psu and a memtest if not test the gpu in another system under load .

 

[frenchbread]

Are all the video card drivers up to date?

Yes, this was one of the first things I checked.

 

[Gagan Karhana]

1. you Should check your PSU, may be it is not providing constant power
(you could use your graphics card in another pc with sufficient supply or borrow someones PSU)
2. your graphic card's cooling fan is not able to throw heat away
(you could clean your GPU's fan, if it is blocked with dust)
usually 1-2 yrs old cards doesn't die but, needed to be cleaned after every 6 months, i also do it, it increases its life)

(use air blower or blow air with your mouth or vaccum cleaner)
(vaccum cleaner is not much effective and is some how dangerous)
{cleaning will not void warranty even many companies like EVGA recommends periodic cleaning Just
remove upper cover carefully without damaging card and if there is any warranty seal then don't do it
just use blower,vaccum cleaner or your mouth,''mouth'' is best option to do it }
3. may be its a driver problem use older one, if not checked till now

 

[scout_03]

what about the psu test and the internal video chipset you did not answer this .

 

[frenchbread]

Sorry for the delayed reply.

this board have a onboard video chipset so remove the gpu and try with it only to see if you have the same issue if yes i would look at the psu and a memtest if not test the gpu in another system under load .

My issues were mainly related to putting the graphics card under a load. It would probably be hard to get any useful info from running the integrated graphics since they probably couldn't handle any of these games anyway and its hard to crash a video driver if I'm not using that video driver.

1. you Should check your PSU, may be it is not providing constant power
(you could use your graphics card in another pc with sufficient supply or borrow someones PSU)
2. your graphic card's cooling fan is not able to throw heat away
(you could clean your GPU's fan, if it is blocked with dust)
usually 1-2 yrs old cards doesn't die but, needed to be cleaned after every 6 months, i also do it, it increases its life)

(use air blower or blow air with your mouth or vaccum cleaner)
(vaccum cleaner is not much effective and is some how dangerous)
{cleaning will not void warranty even many companies like EVGA recommends periodic cleaning Just
remove upper cover carefully without damaging card and if there is any warranty seal then don't do it
just use blower,vaccum cleaner or your mouth,''mouth'' is best option to do it }
3. may be its a driver problem use older one, if not checked till now

1. I have no way to check my PSU without buying another. I literally don't know anyone with a desktop.
2. I clean my computer out about once every 4 months and it has dust filters.
3. This ended up being the solution. The problems began to get worse and so I rolled back to version 331.58. Now everything works fine and game play is smooth. Apparently Nvidia really messed up the new 331.65 driver.