9800 Pro Overheating?

[nubhole]

Hi I've been having some problems with my computer freezing while playing games recently. It's a ATI 9800 Pro that I bought about 3 years ago (never overclocked) and had been working fine until about this summer. I started getting freezes during games at random times (could be a couple minutes or a few hours into gameplay) and a BSOD would show up with a machine check error. I boosted AGP voltage to 1.65 and that kept the crashing from happening for a while. However, last week my computer would start freezing immediatly anything 3D was rendered (game intros or trying to start the atitool 3d display). But now instead of the BSOD error message I just get a plain light blue screen.
At first I thought it might be a hard drive error so I defragged and ran checkdisk. I also uninstalled ati drivers, used driver cleaner and installed cat 6.9. Nothing worked until I pulled out my card, blew the dust off of it and out of the heatsink and reinserted it. Now it's back to the level where it crashes after about 15min-1 hour of gameplay with light blue screen. And right before the computer freezes I also get a beep from the PC speaker and the HD access light comes on and stays lit.

Also I don't know if this is normal, but if I can push down on the edges of the HSF on the card and it will tilt instead of staying firm.

Any suggestions like pulling off HSF and reapplying thermal compound or is my card just dying? Thanks !

ATI 9800 Pro Stock
2x 512MB PC4000
MSI Neo 2 Platinum
AMD64 3300+
Antec 380W Truepower
DVDR
120GB Seagate
AGP set at 4x, 1.6V, fastwrite off

 

[niji1875]

I met seems what u met.

maybe overheating or power not enough, bios error, driver error.

so, u can try

1.always keep ur case open.

2.flash a new bios (maybe dangerous, but I think it will fix problem. need backup the old, search a same parameter one)

3.unplug dvdr when u not use(cut power supply to others)

4.change to lower edition driver.

5. try to change motherbroad bios parameters, such as fastwrite on.

 

[Degial]

Looks like the video memory is duying. Try to force the memory clock lower than nominal.
If it doesn't help, lower both GPU/Memory clocks

 

[nubhole]

Thanks! I set the mem and and gpu clocks down by 20mhz each and so far no more freezing. I'll try to move them up to test what level I can maintain stability at.