hmmm.. a dead 5850?

[konakona]

I was playing around with my xfx 5850 xxx and AC twin turbo pro yesterday, found out it was ~65C in furmark at stock speeds (35C at idle) with the AC heatsink on. Tried some OC'ing and it wasn't responding too well. Took it out and realized the heatpipes were colliding with the base plate from the original cooler that I was using to cool memory chips and the VRMs (note: I figure this depends on the maker and model of the card in question, presumably powercolor cards do not suffer from this).

After several more attempts at bending the heatpipes up to gain sufficient clearance, I thought I had a pretty good shot at it. Googled around a bit and found out most people were recommending vcores of no higher than 1.2v for safety, so I didn't go above 1.18v. Furmark crashed at around 84C (900/1200), so I proceeded to turn it off promptly. (Actually, I am not sure which happened first - that or oblivion crashing at 850/1200).

Came home from work, gave it yet another try at improving the fit and put the card back in, only to find out the monitor wasn't picking up any signal from any of the three available output on the video card (1 HDMI and 2 DVIs). Put the card in another computer, still no response. The same computer the 5850 was in at first booted up fine with a spare video card.

Now, the scary part is I am able to hit caps lock on the keyboard and toggle the LED on and off. Don't think I am hearing the HDD churning though, so I don't think the computer boots up (had a 4830 previously that didn't display anything on the monitor yet allowed the computer to boot).

So... do you guys think the card is dead? I really can't think of a single thing other than furmark crashing, which is why I was right there to turn it off immediately.

 

[zerocool84]

Have another card to try in the system?

 

[konakona]

yep, already tried it and the rest of the system works fine.

Thought I wrote it there too, but I guess I should have put a cliffs there somewhere

 

[bryanW1995]

ruh roh

 

[MagickMan]

I'm certain the voltage didn't kill it. 1.3v is about as high as I'd recommend for a 5850 with stock cooling, so 1.18 isn't a big deal at all, and 84C is a walk in the park for modern GPUs. You must have shorted something out somewhere or broken a trace.

However, I will say that I don't use Furmark. There's very little practical reason for it, not when you can just loop Heaven for several hours and get a more accurate test of how a card will actually behave while gaming. Furmark really punishes a 58x0's VRMs, much much more than in any real world scenario.

 

[konakona]

I'm certain the voltage didn't kill it. 1.3v is about as high as I'd recommend for a 5850 with stock cooling, so 1.18 isn't a big deal at all, and 84C is a walk in the park for modern GPUs. You must have shorted something out somewhere or broken a trace.

That's what I was thinking too. But given the gentle treatment the card has received, I find that hard to believe as well. Strange indeed.

Two things that come to mind:

1) There was a ton of TIM on the heatsink, which somehow got smeared and spilled over to the SMT components between the chip and the square ledge (err.. excuse me for the lack of a better term for it...). I eventually cleaned it, but it shouldn't matter as AC claims its electrically insulating
http://www.arctic-cooling.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=39_&mID=127

2) The heatplate was colliding with the heatpipes on the heatsink as I said, so it may have been pressed against the PCB somewhat. I doubt this could have had any drastic effect, there were screws in place holding it tightly against the PCB in the first place. Besides, the memory chips and VRMs had some sort of thermally conductive padding on them.

 

[konakona]

The only way out seems to be RMA, but I broke one of the legs on the red fan inside the shroud, as I had to pry it off with the screw being totally worn out. It has three legs to attach itself to the heatplate, wonder if BFG would be ok with it if I just use two of the legs?
Doubtful, but oh well. I knew that was gonna get me down the road the time comes for RMA, just didn't know it was gonna be this soon lol