editwipe

3 cards is just too wierd, i would also suggest a PSU or Motherboard issue.

I'd have to say mobo, but the team Red in me says it's all them crap NV cards.

I might have to agree with Steve-O.

You either have a problem with your motherboard or your ram.

PCIE slots can get damaged by heat and dust, if they short out, they will damage whatever gets stuck in them. Trust me on that one I just went through that exact same issue.

Reseat your ram, and run a memtest on it to see if there are any faults. Your graphics card still depends on your physical memory for buffering. Maybe that 6gb is a bad configuration?

Almost all Nvidia cards have the ability to connect a second power supply to their pcie jacks in order to troubleshoot power options.

Just look up how to make a psu a test psu (all it needs is a paperclip). All you'll need is at least a 400w psu to test this with, shouldn't be too hard to find an old one. Even then though it could have bad capacitors and not provide enough power.

Also try disconnecting non essential power cables and narrowing it down to just the board, cpu, one hard disk and a gcard. That will allow for optimal power flow.

Try overclocking (or underclocking) your pcie slot if the option is available to you (it is).

Also, is there any chance you were rma'd the same card as you sent them? I've had that happen before, they thought it was fine but wasn't...

Good luck...

editwipe

Bad configuration= Mismatched or 'non ideal' timings, clocks etc.

The 5850 is a beast and by leaps and bounds the coolest gaming card I've ever owned. I've never broke 55 during stress testing yet.

Will also give you a significant boost over your 280. The 5850 outperforms the GTX 285 by a pretty respectable margin.

As far as the RMA stuff goes, maybe put it up for sale...

Test your Ram too. Make sure the bios has it set to correct volts and timings to eliminate that as being the culprit.

editwipe

If the board has onboard video, try that. If no issues most likely video card.

If the issue persists when running onboard, the GPU is fine and there is another issue. psu, ram or cpu. Test each to eliminate.

when was the last time you wiped, formatted and reinstalled windows?

editwipe

I don't play Aion, but a few people I know have tried it and all of them have had video issues to the point where they had to give up on it.

If you are getting error codes that point to a cpu issue. Put things back to stock on your board/cpu ( meaning stock vcore and clocks) and retry. Then you can slowly OC again until things go weird, back it off some until stable with the game in question.

A year on an OS is arguably long enough depending on how many installs/uninstalls etc you do. A fresh start isn't entirely a bad idea at some point soon. This may or may not have any bearing on your current issue.

I would also remove the heatsink, clean and redo the thermal compound. This should be a yearly habit anyways. Also re-seat the cpu.

I've had CPU's like this before where I'd go a year or more at a certain speed and everything would be fine and then all the sudden it was too much for it and I'd have to back down on it. I found it weird as well but I just thought I'd let you know that it does happen to other people as well.

Glad you figured out the problem though.

editwipe

I would make sure USB on boot is enabled. Also when in doubt, plug in a ps/2 Keyboard and try it.

Dude thats really sh*tty luck you have there with the hardware. Good time to go get an upgrade, RMA the current board and when it comes in, leave the seal intact and sell it.