Fried graphics card???

[feZian_leVels]

forgive me if I'm asking this in the wrong place.

Laurentio,you totally saved my skin in January and resolved the UPS virus problem for me.

I have another PC,,Dell XPS 630i,with dual nvidia 9800gt cards,Q6600 motherboard and 3GB RAM.
I was running Vista 32 when my problem started,and since replaced it with Win 7 Ultimate,but the problem is still there.
The problem is as follows:I very often was getting BSOD under Vista and out of the blue (no pun) my PC froze playing BC2 ,prompting a manual ,push button restart.
WHen the machine rebooted I was welcomed by heavy pixellation at the start up screen (BIOS menu is virtually unreadable),and when Windows kicks in I'm getting thick vertical red lines all down the monitor.
Troubleshooting explains that windows has switched off the graphics cards because they report a fault and reports a CODE 43.

Also the card fans are running full tilt ,all the time..

I tried updating BIOS/graphics drivers and so on and have had no joy.
Question is ...are my graphics cards bust,and if so would that even explain the weird artifacts at start up,before windows has even kicked in??
Or is my motherboard bust too or BIOS corrupted??
Dell support are no good and nvidia is a joke.
Please help if you can.
All the best my friend...hope you get this

[laurentio]

it looks like the graphic card is gone especially that you get the artefacts in BIOS too. what make and model is the card?

[feZian_leVels]

Hi Laurentio..nice to talk to you again!
I was running dual nvidia 9800GT cards.
Today i put the 'slave' card into the 'master' slot,which I took out completely, and the problem went away.
Seems the master card is fried.
Thanks for the reply..I so much appreciate your help.
Time to buy a new graphics card
Keep up the good work..you are the best.
Regards 'til next time