XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog - Locking up, reboot then fine

[Cragen]

My setup

q6600 OC'd 3GHz, 8GB RAM
EVGA Nforce 680i SLI
Corsair 620Watt PS
Vista x64 Business
This is a new PC.
Ran diagnostics, everything is fine.
So I get everything up, latest BIOS, mainboard drivers, Vista updates and hotfixes. I install the drivers I downloaded off the XFX site, then I tried the 169.25 Nvidia drivers.
I install Company of heroes and I get seconds per frame. Its completely unplayable. I drop all the settings to low; the exact same performance.
I install Gears of War, thinking that maybe it has something to do with CoH.
Same thing. Ridiculous. So I suck it up and try running around in GoW and then BAM, red dots, lock up, and I have to restart.

Upon restarting, the BOTH games work flawlessly. I play for the rest of the day into the night, into next morning. Temperatures <65. I'm happy.
I install Call of Duty 4. Beautiful.

Shut down, restart next day, seconds per frame, ALL games are unplayable!
I load up gears of war, 5 mins into it, it red dots, I am forced to reboot and then all games are now playable. I play again for hours upon hours. No problems whatsoever. NONE. NONE!!!

I dunno....its disheartening. Cause this morning, I tried the Gears of War fix. No go. Do I never shut down my PC again if I get it to play?

When it works, its WORKS...it cant by my hardware. I stressed it out for hours and I've played excessively when it does. Maybe its the card?

Help, thanks.

[xfxsupport]

That is an unusual problem and could be the video card. By chance are you able to test the card in another system or another 8800GT in your system? Usually if the hardware if faulty, a simple restart will not resolve the problem.

[Cragen]

I have a friend I could loan the card to and he would be able to put it in his system and let me know.
And yes, it is quite a weird one. It only happens when I launch gears of war as well. The other games just run choppy whilst with GoW is locks up and I cant do anything but restart. Then it works fine...man, I dunno.

:)

I'll loan it to my friend and see how it goes. I will miss it tho.

By the way, I got a friend to buy this from newegg, and then had it shipped to me home in Trinidad. Lets see how much shipping this will cost me if I have to send it back...

[Cragen]

So I've got good news, and I've got bad news.

The good news.
I've seen what the problem is. This is what I see when I load RivaTuner normally

http://x026.uploaderx.net/x/1203380958.jpg

This is what I see when I do a forced shutdown while playing a game

http://x026.uploaderx.net/x/604_1203380958.jpg

The bad news.
You have to fix this.
Can u give me like a bios update so it doesnt do this? I REALLY dont want to send in the card, I'm REALLY far away.

Let me know please.

Thanks!!

[Cragen]

Tech support...what do you make of this?

[xfxsupport]

If you do not have Rivatuner installed do you still have the same problem? What temps are you getting for your idle/load? Try uninstalling Rivatuner, Ntune anything similar that will adjust the setting on the video card. I am not sure why it shows such slow speeds for your video card. Did you have a chance to test it in your friends system to see how it performs there?