How do I tell if my graphics card is defective?

Question

I have an nVidia 470 on an Asus X58 motherboard, and it runs fine for everything except games. When I try to play Steam games like The Force Unleashed and Portal, the video portions of the game play fine, but as soon as it switches to gameplay, the screen freezes, flickers black, and/or crashes in a very dirty way, usually freezing my whole system and often (but not always) necessitating a hard reboot.

I've been agonizing over this for almost a year now, and I've reinstalled my DirectX software and drivers. I ran BurnInTest and got the all-OK for my 3d graphics setup. After going through all of the excellent advice provided by the others on this Exchange, I still can't get it to work. I even set up a dedicated Windows install just for gaming that runs off of a platter hard drive instead of my everyday install that boots from an SSD, just in case that was the problem. Nada.

Thinking I should bite the bullet and buy another card, but I want to know if there is some way of making sure that the issue really is the card before I plunk down money for a replacement. Has anybody had this problem, or know of a good way to diagnose my problem? Thanks!

Edit:

Hardware specs (as reported by Speccy):

• Motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. SABERTOOTH X58 (LGA1366)

• Graphics: 1280MB GeForce GTX 470 (nVidia)

• CPU: Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.07GHz

• Hard drives:
  117GB INTEL SSDSA2M120G2GC ATA Device (SATA-SSD)
  977GB Western Digital WDC WD10EALS-00Z8A0 ATA Device (SATA)
  1465GB Western Digital WDC WD15EARS-00MVWB0 ATA Device (SATA)

• Power supply: Seasonic/Owltech 660W X-Series

Answer

There is no diagnosis software for graphic cards available. The best way is to borrow or buy a other graphics card you're sure it have no defects.

But even if the other graphics card works flawless does not mean that the other is defective. Sometimes the power supply is the source of the problem. High end graphic cards requires (if in use) a high and continous wattage. Your power supply should have enough power but keep in mind that slightly variations in the wattage output can create problems for your graphics card.

On the other hand my best bet is that you memory has a defect because (as you told) Furmark is running without problems and really stresses the graphics card. The difference between Furmark or other desktop applications and games is the memory usage. Memory usage is much higher in games and the probabiliy a defective area get used is much higher. So i suggest to run memtest.

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