Problems with Radeon 9800 XT

[Shibumi7]

About 6 months or so months ago, my video card began to give me problems in 3d accelerated games. It would crash while strolling through graphic intensive areas of WoW and sometimes depending on the instance I would get pixelated columns of green and pink spots. So, after inspection into the problem I discovered it was a heat issue due to my card's fan dying. I promptly purchased an Arctic Cooling Fan + heatsink, installed it, and the problems went away.... Until now.

I formatted my PC yesterday, and reinstalled windows fresh, along with all my up to date drivers, my utilities, and a couple games. Battlefield 2142 won't play at all, Diablo II eventually gets very very pixelated. All the colors are wrong, mainly pinks and reds. I have the same issue in Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, but to a lesser degree. I would chalk it up to a driver issue except I've tried three different releases of the Catalyst drivers. I've updated DirectX and all that jazz as well. I also checked my new fan\heatsink combo and its still properly attached, freshly dusted, and the fan is operational. I don't think its heat related. Could my card finally be dying? Is it some crazy ATI problem with drivers?

Anyways... I find it kind of strange that up until the format of my PC the card was working perfectly fine. 2142 ran like a dream, as well as all my other games completely unpixelated.

The specs on the machine are as follows...

Processor: Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
Motherboard: Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Ram: 2.0gb of 800mhz Dual Channel Memory
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256mb
Hard Drives: 2x 36gb 10,000 rpm Raptors in Raid Stripe 0 Setup

What should I do to test if its crapping out? Are there 100% for sure working drivers to check on? And if its dead, dont' bother giving me a replacement AGP card, I think its definately past due to craft myself a new machine.

Thanks in Advance.

 

[jrtolson]

i would hazzard a guess, it is your heatsink/fan assembly. remove it clean up the paste and re install it, making sure that it covers not only the gpu, but also the ram modules aswell.

Artifacts usually apear when gpu or memory is over heating, or bad ram due to over heating and when been pushed too far over and under clocking wise.

download ATI tool and run a test for artifacts at default clock then lower slightly to see if that remidies the card. as the 9800xt is basically a 9800pro overclocked

if the artifacts don't dissapear by this stage, then the video ram has gone bad.

buy a new card

 

[almerac]

your video card probably is dying, the heat issue before could have damaged it permanently, and the fact that you put better cooling on it, (compared to the previous cooler) could have alleviated it for a short while. you could try under clocking it to get some stability in the mean time. but i would get a new card ASAP.

if you really cant get a new card (it sounds like a $150 card would fit the bill nicely for you) you can try reinstalling the drivers, and windows again, and try to rule out all possible software problems, then try swapping the video card with another to rule out a hardware one.

 

[JJMAN]

i would hazzard a guess, it is your heatsink/fan assembly. remove it clean up the paste and re install it, making sure that it covers not only the gpu, but also the ram modules aswell.

if the artifacts don't dissapear by this stage, then the video ram has gone bad.

buy a new card

I was thinking of the heatsink/fan and regooping it also. Try that option first and assure that when you reassemble it that it is secure on the core and memory. Other wise you probably need a new card. 🙁 Try the regooping first and see. Good Luck.

 

[Shibumi7]

Thanks for you guys help, I did the checks on my heatsinks and my fan. And it seems that cooling is not the problem at all, the card stays at a decent temp no problem. I've decided to go ahead and buy a card to replace it temporarily until I build my new machine at about the end of the summer.

Thanks for your help again...

Any pointers on what to do with the old card? Is there like a card salvage thing I could send it to? or a possible way to get any money out of the card?