- Nov 16, 2006
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This poor card had seen a lot of abuse at the hands of my friend (who is a pretty unabashed Nvidia fanboy, who picked up this card almost as if he needed to validate his hatred of ATI and love of Nvidia). In the process of taking off the stock heatsink he broke the stock fan, cut the fan wires, and tore out the 2-pin fan plug on the card itself. The card then sat "naked" and neglected under a pile of crap in the corner of his room for a couple months (he "traded up" to a GTS 250, which he eventually replaced yet again with his old GTX260). So I bought it off of him at a bargain basement price ($60), and it was a wonderful, cheap little upgrade over my 4850. It performed well (~16.5K in 3dmark 06) and the gig of memory made playing at 1080P much less stressful than it was with the 512Mb 4850.
It didn't have any fan or heatsink so I used an old VF900-cu (http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=145) and it worked great, card didn't idle over 40C or ever make it past 50C under load.
However the fan was loud as hell. I put up with it for a couple months then I picked up a Scythe 5.25" fan controller (I think you might see where this is going) and hooked up the GPU cooler to it.
I throttled the fan down to 1500 RPM, which made the fan totally silent while keeping the idle temps at ~45C. It worked fine for a week, watching DVD movies, Flash and all sorts of general computer stuff. Weekend comes around and its time to play some Alien Swarm. Fire the game up without ramping up the speed of the GPU fan, and the game opens fine and the game menu works properly for about 5 minutes when the screen fuzzes out, goes blank, then 30 seconds later my computer just shuts down.
Turned back on just fine, but there was no output to either of my two screens. Took the card out and put my old 4850 in there, and the computer boots up fine with no problems. So the 5770 must be dead.
However, aren't there safeguards in place to keep the card from frying itself at stock settings? My computer even went into thermal shutdown, which one would imagine was designed to protect the GPU from damaging itself. It seems unlikely but possible that the card's prior treatment could result in such a failure?
It feels strange going from my 4850 to the 5770, then back to the 4850 and perhaps up to a GTX 460 or something. Like a lot of wasted money and effort. I feel more compelled than ever to wait for ~5850 performance at ~200 dollars, and to never use after market cooling again.
It didn't have any fan or heatsink so I used an old VF900-cu (http://www.zalman.com/ENG/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=145) and it worked great, card didn't idle over 40C or ever make it past 50C under load.
However the fan was loud as hell. I put up with it for a couple months then I picked up a Scythe 5.25" fan controller (I think you might see where this is going) and hooked up the GPU cooler to it.
I throttled the fan down to 1500 RPM, which made the fan totally silent while keeping the idle temps at ~45C. It worked fine for a week, watching DVD movies, Flash and all sorts of general computer stuff. Weekend comes around and its time to play some Alien Swarm. Fire the game up without ramping up the speed of the GPU fan, and the game opens fine and the game menu works properly for about 5 minutes when the screen fuzzes out, goes blank, then 30 seconds later my computer just shuts down.
Turned back on just fine, but there was no output to either of my two screens. Took the card out and put my old 4850 in there, and the computer boots up fine with no problems. So the 5770 must be dead.
However, aren't there safeguards in place to keep the card from frying itself at stock settings? My computer even went into thermal shutdown, which one would imagine was designed to protect the GPU from damaging itself. It seems unlikely but possible that the card's prior treatment could result in such a failure?
It feels strange going from my 4850 to the 5770, then back to the 4850 and perhaps up to a GTX 460 or something. Like a lot of wasted money and effort. I feel more compelled than ever to wait for ~5850 performance at ~200 dollars, and to never use after market cooling again.
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