win 7 only boots in safe mode. suspect vid card? help plz

[robble]

today when i got home form work my computer was frozen. reset it and when it should have gone to the login screen it went black. reset again and win 7 was saying the computer was not reset properly and needed to repair itself.. it came back saying it was unsuccessful repairing itself.

tried a nukmber of things including scf /snannow which wouldn't complete..
tried botting in safe mode and it came up and let me log in. re ran scf /scannow and it said no problems found.

decided to try uninstalling the AMD drivers using an amd cleanup utility. reset and boom! got into windows normally. downloaded the 12.4 drivers and installed.. reboot - and exact same problem.

could my vid card itself be bad? I do have video when the amd drivers aren't present.

i currently have a 7970 and a 6950 that was flashed to 6970. monitor runs off the 7970.
I do mine bitcoin/litecoin 24/7 with both cards.

my rig is watercooled so pulling out the 7970 isn't a simple job to try testing with just the 6950. think this is hardware or software related?

Thanks!

 

[burritoincognito]

For whatever it's worth, I had a similar issue on a client's 8400GS. Turned out the fan had failed, and if you tried to run the full driver suite, it froze up or wouldn't boot properly, but worked fine in safe mode.

Had to replace the card in that case.

 

[ehksohset]

Have you attempted a system restore from well before the issue occurred? I have trouble suspecting the video card at this point in time without more evidence of that being the issue (unless I missed something).