GW blew up my video card

Well, I've had my Geforce 8500 gt video card for a year and a half and it's worked fine. Last night after my computer had been idling for quite a while, (I had played earlier in the day and stopped to do some errands) I started up GW, loaded into Kamadan, and immediately started getting crazy video errors (flashing polygons of colors) for like 5 seconds then my computer completely froze. Soft reboot didn't work, so I did a hard reboot. Now my computer won't start except in safe mode. So I tinker, do a system restore, etc etc. Finally I got around to disabling my video card drivers and my computer starts up okay, but obviously with terrible screen res etc. Looking into my case, it appears like one of my case fans got jiggled loose so it may not have been running, so it's possible it overheated? There's fans on the card itself, and an added fan right in the slot next to the video card but the main case fan may not have been running. Is my card done for? Should I even bother trying to reload my drivers and so on (assuming I can even find them) Or should I start shopping for a new card?

GW ate a 7600GT of mine with graphical errors on the 3-d side exactly as you describe (flashing polys). It began with tears and eventually went to the point where it was rendering large portions of scenery incorrectly. Drivers shouldn't fix this it does sound like your card is on it's way out. I also highly doubt it's heat related...gpu-z had mine well within spec for core temperature but you should check. The card I went to was a 9600GT dual-slot and I've been happy with it. Not that there is a lot of case clutter...it's my only expansion card.

graphic card failure does happen unfortunately, and are not necessarily related to GW. your card is basically toast at this point, and must be replaced.

It does sound like a dead video card, thankfully you can replace that with a similar or better card very cheaply right now. What's your budget, and what Power Supply do you have???

Well, about 2 months ago I put in a 500w power supply so I've got plenty of juice. I'd rather not spend more than $100 on a card, also I don't have room for any more cooling fans so it can't be anything that runs super hot. I'd prefer pci-ex. Should I stick with nvidia, or is there something better?

my 8500 GT graphic card also spoil by GW .

If you were to said toast not i dont think so ,my PC i checked not very hot .

Be careful about the number of cooling fans you run and where you place them. Sometimes people put too many cooling fans, placed in the wrong areas. It can result in the air just being swirled around in the case without actually flowing through the case properly.

ATI or nVidia - whichever you like.

there are 500 watt power supplies that are good and there are 500 watt power supplies that are pure junk. What is the make and model of yours? If you have a low priced and/or off brand PSU it may not be up to handling a "modern" video card over the long haul, or even at all for that matter... whether it's 500 watts or 1000.

This dosent mean that your video card just broke from GW it could have been from many other things... Age, overheating (like you said) other graphical configurations just to name a few. I hope you can fix this one or get another for a low cost :/ Sorry to hear about it.