Inspiron 1420: Graphics card dying a slow death?

I've had my Inspiron 1420 for about a year and a half now, with virtually no problems except when dealing with Windows Vista. But, about a month ago, I was playing a very graphics intensive game and all of a sudden my screen froze, colors inverted, and it started to flash and pixelate at me. I turned my computer off, then back on, and this started happening:





I turned my computer off again and blew out all the dust I could, then let it cool down. When I started back up everything was fine again. But about a week later, it did the same thing, but for longer. About an hour later it was fine again. A couple weeks went by and nothing like that happened again, up until about three days ago. I was playing my game again and then it started to pixelate, but I could still play. The screen would scramble, but it was almost like it would refresh every 10 seconds or so and the screen would be fine. That night, I was (again) playing my game and my screen scrambled, froze, and went to your basic blue screen. I rebooted and everything was fine, but the next day I turned on my computer and it did the segemented screen again and when I tried to fix it, another blue screen came up saying " Hardware Malfunction, call you hardware vendor for support. NMI: Parity/Memory Parity Error. System has halted." At that point, I didn't know what to do so I reinstalled Windows and all seemed fine until I re-installed my game. The whole day it was on and off between the screen messing up and being fine. Last night seemed to be the last straw, though, and now my screen won't go back to normal. It's all segmented like the above pictures, and nothing I do seems to make a difference.

The point of this long story is just to find out what's going on. Do I need a new graphics card? Or is my game somehow interfering with drivers (all of which are up to date)? Also, all these problems seemed to have started happening when my computer got too hot (which happens frequently). I'm at a loss. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. My graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce 8400M GS.

 

Yep, looks like your GPU is dying a slow and painful death. If you aren't under warranty anymore, you will most likely need to replace the motherboard.

 

Looks like it's dieing