G73JH-BST7 Screen is black - Discolouring, Stripes and artifacts before

So I don't know how or why this happened but I was using my laptop at a friends' house and all of a sudden the entire screen goes blurry as though there is something wrong with the resolution settings so I try to fix that. I had flashed a different vBIOS approximately eight months ago and I had modified the clock settings within the vBIOS. To what happened:

I was using 3ds max to write a script when the blurriness overtook the entire screen, it seemed as though there was a rendering error. So I went and changed the gpu clock settings since I had set them to something lower in order to preserve battery power but to no avail. I decided that I should restart my laptop and I tried that. I'm not clear on exactly what happened as it shut down but I think it froze and so I forced it to shut down by keeping the power button pressed (happened at 2:30 this morning, wasn't completely awake...).
Then when I rebooted it seemed to be working fine until the windows startup sequence began and ended. At that point the entire screen went bananas. Artifacts, striping, discolouring, not even rendering the logon screen. I had no clue as to what was going on so I shut it down and I tried rebooting it several times to no avail.
At times it wouldn't even post and at others all the lights would turn on with a black monitor. I even tried going into my openSUSE installation instead but even that was unavailable and gave the same monitor madness.
I then thought that maybe I could access the BIOS but when I tried to the screen went black and stayed that way.
Ever since that I cannot even get the laptop to Post.

I am assuming the GPU is fried for some inexplicable reason (Probably Murphy had a hand in it...) It was going strong for practically a year and then poof. The system's gone. What should I do? I plan on taking it to the ASUS technical service, even if the warranty doesn't cover it (Which it probably doesn't) then I could at know what I can do. Is replacing the GPU an option? I don't want to make an investment into a new GPU only to find that the motherboard also crossed over to the other side. On the other hand I would want to be able to upgrade the GPU to a 6970m and it seems that it works with that card.

I'm quite fond of this beast and I wouldn't want to lose it. I would be grateful for any opinions, advice or personal experience with something similar.

 

It seems everyone's BST7 is going kaput at the same time. I just had mine stop posting and showing any video, but still starting up (I could tell by the windows sounds). I took out the VGA, cleaned the metal contacts with some alcohol, and it worked again.

Mind you, I didn't have those warning signs of blurring and lines, which from what I've heard around the forum is a symptom pointing towards a VGA nearing it's failure.

I hope it's not actually failed in your case though. Some other peeps might have some more helpful tips to chime in with. Keep searching for other threads with similar problems. I've seen at least 5-6 of them in the last 2 months, which is quite shocking.