Funny Letters in POST

[Grimm Fool]

After a hard crash during TF2 that required a power restart I experienced the following problem:

I see random letters during the POST. The Bios has them too. It looks like ASCII art (strange characters). During post several sceens are filled with them. I can't get into windows. It hangs and then eventually restarts. I can get into safe mode. In safemode I see all my harddrives, and can even watch videos (no sound). There are static waving blue lines on the screen. All color displayed on the computer has discoloration. I ran the memory test that takes 7 hours or so. It didn't find any errors. I reset the CMOS, this didn't do anything to fix the issue. I could tell the new CMOS setting did take effect though. I tried a different monitor, the colors didn't change.

My system:
Abit IP35-Pro, socket 775
intel Q6600 2.4 GHz quad core
4 GB A-data DDR2 (pink ram)
Geforce 8800 GTS
Windows VISTA
650 Watt Corsair PSU
Everything is/was running at stock speeds.


I am leaning toward the video card, but I have never seen this before. Any advice as to whether it definitely is the video card or it could be your M-board/video card or somthing else would be appreciated. I don't have another card to drop in and test, I would have to upgrade the card.

 

[Christopher]

Corrupt characters during POST are almost always a sign of a video card going bad. The video card RAM is flipping bits in the frame buffer, hence the corrupted display.