[Troubleshooting] Computer won't boot, suspect video card

[teckman]

Hello, thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

I was playing WoW and my screen went black and sound begins to repeat. This happens probably once every week / every other week so I reboot. This normally fixed the problem. Every other time this happened the screen simply froze, not went black so I was a little alarmed. I reboot, go back into WoW, game freezes again after about 20 minutes. I suspect my computer is overheating as I have not cleaned out the dust in probably a year and have been meaning to do this. I go get some compressed air, clean it out, and now the computer will not boot. I get 1 long beep and 3 short on an ASUS board which supposedly means a video error. I also get a 7F error on the motherboard itself which I'm not 100% sure what that means. It is a 680i board, sorry I don't remember the exact model and can't run Sisoft Sandra obviously. One of the times I booted I noticed the fan on the GPU was not spinning so I gave it a little start manually and it began to spin fine. Also after cleaning the computer and booting it I heard a loud kind of grinding noise like a bad fan. I had heard this sound before after having the computer off for long periods of time. In the past it went away after about an hour. I generally keep my computer on 24/7. Also the computer had been generally underperforming in graphically intense applications.

I feel pretty confident that the video card has gone bad and I will have to try to get a warrantee claim on it or replace it. I am holding out hope it could be the Power Supply, however. Any other thoughts? I don't really have any other computers to try and swap parts to test anything so my ability to troubleshoot this further on my own is pretty limited. It looks like I will have to go to the computer shop ($60) and then buy a new card for a few hundred bucks, neither of which I can really afford. Any help is much appreciated, thank you.

Specs:
Computer built by iBUYPOWER

Windows Vista SP2
Asus 680i MB
4 GB RAM
Intel Q6600
nVidia 8800 GTX

Also sorry if this is posted in the wrong place or you guys don't do tech support type threads anymore, I haven't posted here in a long time.

EDIT:
If the RMA/warranty claim falls through what video card would you guys recommend for this system? I play WoW and SC2. I can spend about $200 max.

 

[noquarter]

Definitely sounds like a dying video card, course PSU is always a remote possibility but everything points to GPU. See if you can RMA it.

 

[teckman]

thanks for the input. If the RMA/warranty claim falls through what video card would you guys recommend for this system? I play WoW and SC2. I can hit up my parents for probably $200 max. I'll put this in the OP also

 

[noquarter]

thanks for the input. If the RMA/warranty claim falls through what video card would you guys recommend for this system? I play WoW and SC2. I can hit up my parents for probably $200 max. I'll put this in the OP also

I'd just hit this chart up and spend accordingly:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650&p=7

edit: oops, forgot the 5770 and 5750 aren't on those benches, assume they're at 4870 and 4850 levels respectively though. I'd go 5770 unless you're positive you don't want the extra features it adds, in that case a 4890 if you can still find a good deal on one.