Heavy fragmenting on Ati Radeon 9000Pro

[boatillo]

Gigabyte brand Ati Radeon 9000pro, 128mb of onboard ram.

When I first got the card...the crappy heatsinks on the bottom side RAM had fallen off in transit. I didn't want to RMA it for such a stupid problem so I got out my Artic Alumina and reattached the heatsinks to the RAM.

Card worked good (as far as I can remember, this is 2 years ago) for maybe a month? Then I started seeing fragments concentrated on my character while playing DAoC. Well it didn't bother me too much...but started to get worse and I would see heavy fragmenting all over the screen in any game I played - except get this...some games (Heavy Metal FAKK2 comes to mind) when I turned AA on the fragments would go away! Not all games, but some.

Well my fiance got me a geforce 5600 for xmas because she couldn't stand watching my play games like that and the Radeon has been in storage since. Now I have upgraded my mb/cpu/ram/etc and want to use the Radeon on my old stuff - sans the fragmenting!

This could be key, but I don't know - now when I look carefully at the card, in three small places I can see that the Arctic Alumina slightly ran over the top of the RAM and is touching a couple of the pins that lead off the side of the RAM modules. Arctic says its electrically nonconducive & noncunductive...but I still doubt it should touch these pins. Also when looking at the main hsf on the gpu (I never ever took this off or messed with it) I can see light come through between the gpu & hsf....they are barely touching at the sides of the chip.

Anyone got a clue?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Either its overheating like a mofo, or you've got some toast memory

 

[boatillo]

Could be the core overheating since the hsf doesnt make good contact.

 

[boatillo]

bumpers

 

[Toro 45]

Clean off the Arctic Alumina with some rubbing alcohol, remove your heatsink, clean off the thermal pad and carefully reapply thermal compound then fire it up see how it does.

 

[dug777]

Originally posted by: Toro 45
Clean off the Arctic Alumina with some rubbing alcohol, remove your heatsink, clean off the thermal pad and carefully reapply thermal compound then fire it up see how it does.

 

[boatillo]

Hehe Artic Alumina is an aluminum oxide and boron nitride epoxy that bonds FOREVER.

Not to be confused with Artic Silver 5 or you got some problems on your hands.



Anyway, I pulled the hsf off the core to see why it wasn't touching well...it would only touch the core at the very edge of each of the core's four corners. The hsf isn't great, but its pretty close to flat and not very rough --- the core on the other hand sucks....THE CORE ISN't FLAT! The four corners all sit up higher than the center or edges, keeping the hsf from making contact.

I've marked the hsf at the places the core touches, I will dremel it out some there so that hopefully the majority of the core can make contact with the hsf after I apply some AS5.