Did my M1530 card finally die?

I know many of you have experienced premature video card death on the M1530s with 8600M GTs due to heat related failure, but I've never been sure exactly what to look for. Here's my situation- I've had my M1530 for about a year and a half now with no serious problems to date. I game regularly and use rivatuner to overclock my card, but I also monitor temps and after I started cleaning the vents regularly and using a CPU undervolt, the max GPU temp never exceeds about 74C.

Today, I fired up my laptop for some racing online with friends (I play GTR2 and GTR Evo online), but I noticed that no matter what I did, the games wouldn't get more than 10-15 frames per second when they normally run anywhere from 35-50FPS on the settings I use, which were unchanged.

I figured the video drivers were acting up so I uninstalled them the proper way, reinstalled them, and had the same problem. I switched to the latest DOX drivers and experienced the exact same issue. Using Riva tuner, I can monitor the clocks and it seems they are as normal, but the games just run so slowly. Before anyone asks, I have my Vista power profile set to high performance and I'm on AC power so that's not an issue.

Could my card finally have succumbed to the well-documented Nvidia heat flaw? I always figured that would result in a BSOD or some sort of strange images on my screen rather than just suddenly massively decreased gaming performance... Any other ideas of what could be causing this?

 

Hey, Seems your card is in its last moments or just to make sure why not try a fresh install on another drive or something to see if the probs persist?

 

I've tried several different drivers, now I'm going to the official dell drivers to see if it makes any difference. Strangely, Counter Strike: Source seems to be running smoothly at 130+ FPS, but all my other games are choppy and unplayable no matter what I do. I'm gonna get on XPS support chat with Dell and see about getting my motherboard replaced, or maybe at this point past the computer's production run they're just shipping SXPS 16s as replacements? That'd be nice! Thank god for my 3 year warranty.