Ahaa - A Gigabyte board with DES. Your graphics card may not be at fault then. I had a graphics card fail on me once and it never once made a sound. The only thing I noticed were graphics anomalies like pixellated lines across the screen which for a while, used to correct themselves. Then one day they didn't and it was dead.
On the other hand With my Gigabyte GA-EP45-DSS board I often hear a GRRRR!!! but it isn't coming from the system...it's coming from me! Those things seem to have a mind of their own (just like all MS operating systems since 98SE).
When first installed it grabbed a large chunk of my new hard drive where it could make a backup. To this day I can't find a way of recovering the space which it purloined
It often disputes my graphics settings and initially refuses to boot. On reset, it decides that my display should be 16 bit not 32. Today it decided that the screen resolution should be 1024x768 not 1680x1050.
In many ways it is a great board. Build quality is excellent but some of the features it offers are probably best left alone particularly if you have very limited computer knowledge like me! I never did install the Energy Saving function so I haven't had any experience with that and the next time I do a system reinstall I'm going to see what other "useful" functions can be omitted!
Hopefully your problems will simply be down to an overactive motherboard system. I think that if the graphics card was on the way out you would have seen other symptoms. Overheating is probably the prime cause of Graphics card failure and that would have been evident from Catalyst Control panel ATI Overdrive panel - that is if you use CCC....or a strong smell of burning if you don't
