Palit GTX 980 artifacts

[airwaveracer75]

I upgraded my system with a new motherboard, new processor, and a new video card. Everything was running smoothly when I booted up the PC for the first time after I've assembled it. I installed the drivers that came with the mobo and installed the latest Nvidia driver for my videocard and restarted the system after the installation of drivers. I experienced the artifacts after the reboot. There were artifacts on the boot screen(where the logo of Asus comes up), in BIOS screen and whenever I resize the screen resolution to higher than 800x600. I used system restore before I installed all these new drivers but to no avail. I did clean uninstall for my GPU driver with ccleaner and ddu but the artifacts were still there. I tried putting the GPU on the other PCIE slot but the artifacts didn't go. I am currently using the integrated graphics and there are no artifacts. Could this be a faulty video card? Thanks in advance!

pictures of the artifacts: http://imgur.com/a/hWyFO

Pertinent Information:
mobo: Asus Z170 Pro Gaming
processor: i5-6600k (stock clock speed)
vidcard: Palit GTX 980 Jetstream
ram: G.Skill Trident Z ddr4 2x8 gb sticks.
psu: Corsair HX650

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

If you're using the same cable for the onboard graphics then I would assume the GPU is DOA and needs to be RMA'd.
One thing to try though, which may sound pretty ridiculous but try both sticks of RAM separately in slot one. When one of my sticks died it caused similar artifacts when I got to Windows (only with GPU), the BIOS displayed perfectly fine though.