problems with arctic cooling NV silencer on 6800?

[dboy]

I've got a compaq desktop (it was a flaming hot deal at compusa a while ago - it's a A64 3400+ that I've upgraded lots).

It's got a Leadtek 6800 AGP card. I was able with stock cooling (the massive leadtek copper HSF on both sides of the card) to unlock it nicely.

I just bought a NV silencer to make it run a bit quieter and exhaust the heat. Installed it, everything seems fine. Boot the computer - there's some minor screen glitches. After a few minutes, it reboots on its own.

Pulled the card out and removed the cooler. Everything looks fine - good spread of thermal goo on the GPU, etc. The silencer has pads to hit the ram and it looks like they do (hard to see for sure).

Put everything back together, and it's still the same. I popped into the bios to see how the CPU temps are. Seems fine. There are glitches even in the bios though - a few letters being the wrong colors. Maybe only 6 or so on the whole screen.

If I leave it in the bios, it'll sit for a long time w/o rebooting. As soon as I go into windows, it lasts just a minute or two and it reboots. It does seem to be heat related, because if the computer's been off a while it'll last a bit longer.

Any ideas?

 

[kpb]

Sounds to me like you probably fried your card with a static shock. It would be pretty hard for it overheat at the bios screen on first boot to corrupt things.

 

[dboy]

I was afraid of something like that... the card was a newegg refurb I bought a few months back and it's been great. I hope it's not dead, but it appears to be

 

[gtjr]

check if the x bracket at the back is installed correctly

 

[dboy]

Bracket sure appears to be - the rubber part is between the board and the metal x. all four screws are turned very snug, but not so far that the x is touching the back of the board anywhere...

 

[videopho]

Convert back to stock cooling fan and try again. If it still doesn't work chances are you might have fried the card while using the NV silencer. The x bracket on the back might not have been installed properly would be my guess which might have overheated the gpu quite a bit.
Good luck!

 

[CKXP]

i'm assuming that you're running the card unlocked. have you tried locking back the extra pipes and shader?

 

[dboy]

I can't relock the pipes because the computer won't stay on long enough.

I reinstalled the original cooler and it's exactly the same. What's weird - in the bios, as I flip through screens, each has color glitches in different places. But as I flip, it's always exactly the same for a given screen. Weird...

 

[dboy]

I put in an old PCI vid card and set it in bios to primary. Windows runs fine now, as long as no monitor is connected to the 6800. Rivatuner said the 6800 was around 38C iirc. When I connected a monitor to the 6800, the computer rebooted within seconds. So I've now pulled the 6800 out and have degraded down to using a PCI Rage II card

Guess it's dead. Anyone know Leadtek's RMA info? I've been to their site and can't find any warranty info!

 

[dboy]