Blown up videocard.....

So i was happyly multiboxing up until a week ago or so, and all of the sudden while questing my screen went black.

Figured what the heck, a glitch can happen, rebooted the pc, and first wow client i fired up i got artifacting and the system slowed down to a crawl :/

So of course i went back to the store, and after a small battle i got the card replaced. It was a Club 3D 8800 GTX, and it got swapped for a XFX 8800 GTX.,

Now my main question, is this something that i can expect to happen again or you guys recon it was just shit luck with the other video card ? (dont suggest using multiple pc's its not worth it in that regard to me)

I mean i like dual boxing but fighting with the PC store every odd few months to get my videocard replaced is not something i wanna be doing :)

i would make sure my power supply was strong enough for all the components of my pc...
im not sure what could cause this, but make sure you installed the card correctly

Power supply is more then enough, and the card is connected well, i meat it worked for 5 months, and well 3 weeks or so with 5 clients.

Just worried that it might not be a fluke thing, and will break another card.

Monitor your card's temperatures if yours supports that. If it's within spec, you should have the same issue. I had an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro that actually physically blew the fan motor off of the heatsink. I noticed because it started artifacting and performing poorly after a few minutes of gaming. Replacing the fan fixed it. Out of all the cards I've had in multiple systems over the last 10 years, it is the only one that's "blown up" like that or like yours.

Temperature and power are the two things I have found that lead to artifacts in your game.

I ran a radeon 9800 pro for 2 years underpowered and had artifacts, just thought the card was crap. Replaced the card and the powersupply. The new card was bad so I had to RMA it. I tried the 9800 pro again and all artifacts were gone and the performance had increased significantly.

Please dont take this as talking down to you if you already know this... but make sure you have enough amps on the appropriate rails. Alot of new power supplys say they are 800 or even 1000 watts but wont run some of the newer cards well due to how the rails are setup.

Then of course there is heat... heat is the enemy. Check your ambient temp and the temp on the card itself. If you need to you can always take the case off and get a fan for a cheap fix.

Properly designed modern hardware running within its designed specifications should not in the vast majority of cases be capable of being permanently damaged by software. The exceptions are mostly things with write once or limited write capability; e-fuses in processors, eeprom or other solid-state memory, and such.

Some video cards just go bad. The more power running through them the faster this will happen but some cards will go bad no matter what. In general, the card will be obsolete LONG before any issues crop up but still... I doubt this is a multiboxing problem - it could have happened even if you were not boxing at all. Just make sure the power supply is good enough.