My PC had a 256mb Nvidia GeForce 8600GT DDR3 card and I am pretty sure it's reached the end of it's life.
Started with graphical anomalies and then the PC is regularly locking after running for about five minutes. the fan is running on the card and I have cleaned out the accumulated dust from the heatsink, but to no avail. The only thing I haven't tried is reapplying some thermal grease between the GPU and the heatsink, but I don't know if that is going to do anything.
Removed the card and switched to the onboard video and I am, at least functional.
I don't know current tech, hardware and pricing related to video cards. Can anyone suggest something comparable and reasonably priced? I am looking for something hopefully in the $100-$150 range. I really don't want top of the line as I don't play much on the PC anymore and what I had was plenty to run TF2, Starcraft 2, Portal 2 and Command and Conquer 3. All of them ran just fine on my hardware and I don't need much more power than that as I don't plan on pushing it much beyond that.
It is a 4 year old Dell Inspiron and it has been running fine up until the card finally crapped out.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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This must be
Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.