Strange failure, probably video card

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I'm guessing I need to replace my video card, but would appreciate
confirmation, or guidance from anyone with knowlege of this stuff.

There's a lot I don't know about devices and their drivers, but I
think I have a failing video card.
Everything looks good on-screen, except that for the last few days
things have been a bit slow.
I didn't pay much attention to it until I noticed that my root
directory is full.

/home is not on the root partition, fortunately, so the impact is
minor.  So far.  But I tracked it down to kern.log and syslog.  They
had grown to 40 GB between them.  There were a huge number of
essentially identical entries, up to dozens per second.  They looked
like this:

Dec  8 11:27:53 treat kernel: [10611.756131] AMD-Vi: Event logged
[IO_PAGE_FAULT device=01:00.0 domain=0x0014 address=0x0000000000256000
flags=0x0000]

This is pretty cryptic, but the device=01:00.0 seems to match this
line of output from lspci(1)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce
8400 GS Rev. 3] (rev a2)

One further bit of evidence.  These lines are added as long as the GUI
is on my monitors (I have 2).  They stop being added if I Ctl-Alt-F1
to a console login.

This seems like a fair bit of evidence, but it's clear outside my expertise.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
Please consider the environment before printing this email.