Asus 6950 most likely broken, second opinion?-Collection of common programming errors

I recently purchased an asus 6950. Upon installing the drivers for the first time on windows 7 64bit, the screen went blank. After restarting the computer and installing the drivers a second time however, all seemed fine and I thought nothing of it.

I was using the computer all night with no hitches. I left it running overnight to download Crysis, played it briefly in the morning, before shutting down and heading for work.

Upon returning from work, I turned on the computer and it greeted me with a BSOD just after windows loaded stating that a critical boot file is corrupt. It loaded into safe mode, but it told me it couldn’t recover the file. Also, after five minutes in safemode, the 6950 fans turned up to full whack and the monitors lost input. The computer became totally unresponsive, to the point where even the hard reset button wouldn’t work. I had to physically turn the computer off.

After this, I booted into my linux installation with the intention of using it to burn a copy of my windows 7 ISO to recover windows, however after 5 minutes of use, the same thing happened again, the fans ran at max speed, the screens went blank and the pc became totally unresponsive. I tried this two or three times, and got the same result.

Finally, I decided to run memtest, as previously dodgy RAM had also caused random crashes, so I wanted to rule this out before writing off my new graphics card. After running memtest for five minutes, I ran into exactly the same problem.

I replaced the graphics card with my old nvidia 8800, and it loaded windows first time without the need to recover windows, and has been running fine for about an hour now, as I write this.

Now I have come to the conclusion that it must be the graphics card that is broken, but before I send it back, I just wanted to get a second opinion. Is there any thing that I could have missed, or any setting that could be wrong to cause the above issue?

My motherboard is an ASUS p5n-d running an intel Q6600. the graphics card in question is an ASUS 6950 directCU II 2GB, and it’s all powered by a 1000 watt psu who’s make and model I cannot recall. If you need any further information, I will provide what I can.

1. The only other possibility I can think of is the power supply, which could be going over load with the card with a higher power consumption. I do not see how this would lead to the fans running at max speed though, so I’m definitely thinking that it’s the graphics card, possibly shorting the motherboard and resulting in a locked condition.