9800 XT Dead???

[xSeongminx]

Well, I jumped on the X850XT bandwagon and got around to powering up my 9800XT (my mobo came back to life...), and I noticed that it had garbled up blocks while loading to Windows (so there were blocks when displaying Bios information). Then once it hit the desktop screen, everything was fine and even ran Warcraft 3 and some movies perfectly. I then removed the card to test it out in my other computer and it had vertical lines down the screen. Here's the weird part... The bars were not colored, they just consisted of many small blocks. I shut down the computer and took the Artic Silencer off, just to see if the core was damaged, and to my eyes, there are no burn marks or damages. Is there something else that can be causing this? Btw, the mobo is not bad, nor is the ram, because when I stick my POS 5500 in there, everything displays fine. Any input and suggestions are appreciated.

 

[SPARTAN VI]

Did you use a conductive thermal paste on the memory modules? Usually the silencers have thermal pads already there, but you never know what some people do.

 

[xSeongminx]

The paste that was on the card is Ceramique by artic silver. I don't know jack about this paste, other than it sux... Could this have been the cause for the death? Btw, this paste was on all the memory chips. Thanks for the input, and lmk the results .

 

[Captante]

Artic Silver Ceramique is actually not that bad as Thermal pastes goes & it won't conduct electricity like regular Artic Silver will so its very unlikely to cause a short... one of my old 9800 Pro's did the same thing yours is doing after I swapped the heatsink though & it never recovered... all I could figure was that I damaged it somhow.

 

[chilled]

My 9800Pro did this. I cleaned off all of the thermal paste thoroughly using alcohol (vhs head cleaner does the trick) and remounted the heatsink with a small grain of paste. Worked fine thereafter.

 

[xSeongminx]

Well, I did a quick clean of the thermal paste but while displaying bios information and loading windows (the image where it says windows xp, with the bar thingy), there were still a small amount of blocks. Then once I got into desktop, there were small artifact dots over the screen (hard to see unless you squint). There are some paste left on.. should I just do a thorough clean and give it another go?