Strange artifacting on Sapphire X800 GTO

[BoberFett]

I bought a couple of refurb Sapphire X800 GTOs from Newegg. I know it was a risky move considering this card was well known for being unlockable, and I'm sure more than a few were messed up and returned, but in this case I got half lucky. One of the cards works flawlessly. The other one has nasty artifacting as soon as it boots into Windows, and the 3D is simply unusable.

http://kyarsgaard.org/images/Artifacts.jpg

I dumped the BIOS from both cards to compare them, and they're different so I thought that might be the culprit. But then I downloaded the BIOS from here

http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/

Sapphire X800 GTO (AGP) 256 MB Jan 20th 2005 6:19 PM Jul 24th 2006 11:06 AM

I ran a binary compare and that file is an exact match with the BIOS from the bad card. The two cards do have different P/Ns, so it seems that there's a different BIOS for different cards of the same model.

I've tried messing with some of the AGP settings in the motherboard BIOS but it hasn't changed anything. I've tried clocking the core and memory way down, and that didn't change anything either. Anybody have any ideas on what the problem might be? Am I best off just trying to return this card and get a different one? Can I try flashing to the BIOS from the good card or is that more likely to hose the card completely?

 

[Munky]

If the card is physically damaged, which it looks like it is, a bios flash is not gonna fix it.

 

[BoberFett]

That's what I wasn't sure about, whether this is something symptomatic of a bad BIOS or bad hardware. Thanks for the input.