Is my Radeon LE dying? Please help!!!

[kimcheeboy]

I'm currently having problems with my 6 month old Radeon LE. It has RAM sinks and Blue Orb installed through it's lifetime. Over the past month, I have noticed display artifacts like broken letters and images in 2D (in BIOS bootup and Win2K loading screen, but NOT in actual Win2K desktop) and 3D (all games have flickering blocks or scrambled screen). I have tried to downclock to even below default and installed newest and older drivers. When watching videos, I notice sustained red striped squares over the video window. Unfortunately, warranty is voided due to ramsink and blue orb. I'm planning to get a new vid card as this seems to be a hardware problem. Most concerning aspect is that even the black BIOS bootup screen has artifacts (tried it on 2 different motherboards). Is my Radeon LE dying of natural causes due to inherent problems with Radeon LE chipsets being "less-than-spec"? BTW, HyperZ has been enabled since day 1 and disabling it AND hardware T&L has no effect on the situation. Thanks!

 

[Jethro666]

Hmmmm. How can anything that happens to your Radeon LE be due to "natural causes" when you say you've added heatsinks to the chip and RAM, and hacked the registry?
Gee, that sounds like the kind of stuff overclockers do! When you run parts above spec, you run the risk of frying them.
At least it's an LE, not a GF3. A fairly inexpensive setback if the chip is fried.


BTW- I think it's fair to say they don't make LEs out of SEs for price differentiation, I imagine they are the cores that didn't pass the quality control at 183MHz.