[Dell Inspiron 1420] Snowing and Tearing

Ok, so here goes, my friend owns an inspiron 1420 with a 8400m GS GPU, so, for no apparent reason, the following symptoms occur, I suspect the GPU, what say you?

Symptom 1 : Unless i disable the GPU device, the screen tears and snows, entering safe mode (which automatically disables the GPU) or uninstalling the GPU driver actually solves this problem. This concludes that the LCD is not at fault here.

Symptom 2 : I tried using all kinds of drivers, including the stock driver, but to no avail. This eliminates the fact that the driver is causing the problem (i even did a clean sweep install here guys)

Symptom 3 : System Restore, Reformatting or whatsoever don't help at all ( I didn't really want to do this as the chances of software causing the screen to throttle is quite little, but...I'll get to that later)

The tears and snows occur only when windows is booted up, never in the BIOS screen, therefore, could overheating be a factor? The technician i called is somewhat strange, in the sense that he completely disregarded a problem in hardware and affirming it's the software problem just because the BIOS screen doesn't snow and tear. Because of that, I did a factory reset and even reformatting the whole thing (I seriously doubted it would, but the technician is adamant about it)

So seriously, what say you?

 

sounds like the card is dying....

time for a mobo replacement