Graphics card suddenly acting peculiar; is it failing?

[GordonTS]

Recently, I hopped on mid-afternoon and started playing Hitman: Blood Money. All of a sudden, my screen shut off (No input, the screen was still on though), my GPU fan started blaring, and the game started looping the last played sound over and over again. I was bewildered, I'd never seen this happen before, so I simply restarted computer and tried to play again -- then it happened once more in Hitman. So I said screw it, let's test it in another game; Grand Theft Auto IV. I played a little bit, and the same thing occured, then I decided something was wrong. I decided to start my diagnosis with a full virus scan with two programs -- Avast and Avira. They both detected no threats and I did a full thorough scan on BOTH of my drives. After the scan completed, I turned on my Hotspot Shield (my internet is limited so it lets me on with no hassle) and started browsing for the AMD drivers for my card. As soon as I went into google, boom, it happened once more. I'm genuinely confused as to why this is happening.

My card is an AMD Radeon HD 6870, I've owned it for a good 1 1/2 years and it's done great until now. I appreciate all the help I can get.

[editline]fuck[/editline]

Specs:

PSU - Corsair CX430 430W
GPU - AMD Radeon HD 6870 (Sapphire)
CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 980 ~3.7GHZ
RAM - 1600 MHZ (I think?) 8 GB sticks

[Drumdevil]

Could you tell us your full system specs? A speccy plus brand and make of your PSU.

You could run a Memtest86 for a couple of hours.

[Ignatius]

Sorry to say this, but the same thing happened to me when my graphics card broke. Same symptoms and everything :(

[SirZoloft]

Run a program like CPUID HWMonitor And monitor your GPU temps. Or you can clean out the fan inside it, and at least make sure its not overheating. But yes, these are signs of a failing card. But you can still save it, especially if its something as silly as a few clogged up fins.

[TronCat]

If you haven't cleaned it yet, i recommend doing that. Dust usually can fuck with the fan, resulting in your graphics card possibility over heating.

[GordonTS]

Solved; brought out the card and blew it out with an air compressor and made sure it was thoroughly cleaned. No problems after an hour of play.

Marking.