Weird corrupted stuff on boot

[mattmag]

I have a 2 year old computer with windows xp, pentium 4, geforce 6600gt, a gigabyte motherboard, and so forth (more info if needed). While using the computer normally yesterday, it suddenly turned off. When I turned it back on, it displayed my bios in a corrupted way - the normal words and numbers have been replaced by blocky black and white corrupted characters. It then goes to the screen that lets you choose safe mode and stuff, but it's corrupted in the same way. After 30 seconds, it starts booting windows but the loading screen has a bunch of blue lines vertically along the screen.  After about 20 seconds of this, it reboots and begins this cycle again.

Incidentally, this happened during tropical storm ernesto last night, but I don't think that's the cause because nothing else in my house was harmed and I have a surge protector.

Thanks for helping!

[mattmag]

here's a video of it happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cUYWkp3NMk

[mattmag]

i put in a new card and it worked for a while. then it died too. whats wrong here?

[GX1_Man]

Looks like a bad video card. What are ALL of the components of this poor machine?

[mattmag]

gigabyte 915p motherboard with a pci-e slot and an agp slot
intel pentium 4 530 3ghz lga775
2x512 mb corsair ddr2 533 value ram
sparkle nvidia geforce 6600 gt
creative sound blaster audigy
80 gb hitachi sata hdd
100 gb maxtor sata hdd
cd-rw drive unknown brand
nec dvdrw drive
mge 600w psu
dynapower usa case

i dont think i missed anything...

anyways, i tested the 6600gt on another computer and it's surely dead. i then tried an agp geforce 4 on my computer then it worked for awhile. it died and didnt display anything on the screen (not even the corrupted crap that my 6600 showed). after it died, i tried the geforce 4 on another computer and it's ok. so, do i need a new motherboard? psu? a whole new system?

[GX1_Man]

I don't know what an MGE power supply is, but it sounds like some low end Chinese crappola that could have taken other components out along the way to it's demise.

The only way is to start swapping things out. Keep it simple and just have the MB, CPU/fan, 1 stick RAM and the simplest video card you can find/vborrow. (Maybe an old PCI card?) Swap in a known working PSU and go from there.

[mattmag]

after a bit of investigation i was surprised to find that mge actually looks like a respectable company from california. found at mge-usa.com. and i actually have a 450w psu - i read the wrong thing on the label. i'm going to try to borrow a psu from a friend, but from what i was told at another help forum, the problem is my motherboard. im not sure so i will do some testing by swtiching in and out some stuff. on one hand, im hoping that i will have a reason to get one of those nice core 2 duos ive been eyeing up in the last month, but i also dont know if im quite ready to spend all that money.