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I've gotten myself into a bit of a bind and I was wondering if someone might be able to help me out. As the title suggests, I have a 9800 Pro 128MB card. A few days ago while I was sitting at my computer, my screen started to have sections turn pink. I immediately shut down since I didn't want to risk frying anything. Everytime I started back up, my screen still had pink regions, almost like a checkerboard pattern. Upon further investigation, it turned out the fan on the card had siezed up so the chip was overheating within a matter of seconds. If the computer was left off for a while, it only took about 30 seconds for the pink to popup.
I'd had this problem on previous cards, so like I did with them, I took the fan off the card, put some oil in the bearing, and reattached it. It worked great. Or so I thought. Yesterday, I came back to my computer after leaving it alone for a couple hours to find the same pink checkerboard pattern on the screen again. This time though, I had no idea how long it had been like that. I shutdown right away and let my computer sit for about 20 minutes. I checked the card, and the fan had stopped working again. I turned the computer back on after letting the card cool just to see what the damage was, and all my screen will display now is total garbage. I can see my computer booting through all the trash, so I know the card is still getting and processing information, but it's output is all garbled.
I thought that maybe replacing the heatsink/fan with an aftermarket one would fix the problem, so I picked up a BFG VGA heatsink/fan and installed it, but that didn't do any good. I honestly didn't think it would, but on $200 card it seemed like it was worth the effort. I've also seen this problem be caused by a corrupt video bios so I downloaded a standard 9800 Pro 128MB video ROM and re-flashed the card (i used an old PCI card to boot my PC) but that didn't work either.
I've been around computers for a long time and I like to think of myself as pretty knowledgable, but I've never come across this problem before. I was under the impression that if a GPU was killed because of heat, the card would just be dead. But I know the card isn't totally gone because I still make out some objects through all the trash on the screen.
Sorry for writing a novel, but if anyone has any experience with this and can think of anything I can try to fix my card I would greatly appreciate the help. Thanks in advance.
I'd had this problem on previous cards, so like I did with them, I took the fan off the card, put some oil in the bearing, and reattached it. It worked great. Or so I thought. Yesterday, I came back to my computer after leaving it alone for a couple hours to find the same pink checkerboard pattern on the screen again. This time though, I had no idea how long it had been like that. I shutdown right away and let my computer sit for about 20 minutes. I checked the card, and the fan had stopped working again. I turned the computer back on after letting the card cool just to see what the damage was, and all my screen will display now is total garbage. I can see my computer booting through all the trash, so I know the card is still getting and processing information, but it's output is all garbled.
I thought that maybe replacing the heatsink/fan with an aftermarket one would fix the problem, so I picked up a BFG VGA heatsink/fan and installed it, but that didn't do any good. I honestly didn't think it would, but on $200 card it seemed like it was worth the effort. I've also seen this problem be caused by a corrupt video bios so I downloaded a standard 9800 Pro 128MB video ROM and re-flashed the card (i used an old PCI card to boot my PC) but that didn't work either.
I've been around computers for a long time and I like to think of myself as pretty knowledgable, but I've never come across this problem before. I was under the impression that if a GPU was killed because of heat, the card would just be dead. But I know the card isn't totally gone because I still make out some objects through all the trash on the screen.
Sorry for writing a novel, but if anyone has any experience with this and can think of anything I can try to fix my card I would greatly appreciate the help. Thanks in advance.
