WTF is with my GPU?

[irishScott]

I have an Acer TavelMate 8204, with a Discrete ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256 MB. It overheated a few days ago while I was playing Ghost Recon, motherboard shut down. I have since purchased a laptop cooling pad (Zalman).

Now, whenever I play a game involving serious use of DirectX, after only a few minutes of gameplay, it will stutter for a few seconds and eventually freeze. I then have to reboot. It is impossible for said card to gain any heat during this time period. The graphics are also flawless until it freezes.

I've tried upgrading the drivers, but I doubt that's the problem (it wasn't doing this originally with the old drivers). Any suggestions? Could the heat have crippled my card?

 

[Engraver]

Download a program to check your temps. If it got very hot it may have damaged something.

 

[Keysplayr]

Actually, max GPU temps can be reached very quickly under load. I'm talking seconds not minutes. So, it's not impossible. I would say that most likely the number of freezes you have had was more than "once", correct? Remove and reinstall your drivers as they may have become corrupted from hot shutdowns. And make sure your laptops air vents are clean and unobstructed, especially if your a smoker.

And one other thing. Depends on if your onboard graphics has it's own little fan, and if it does, did it fail? Something to look into.

 

[Modelworks]

Are you running the laptop off the battery or the power supply ?
Does it do it if its running off the battery ?

Is it possible to inspect the heatinsk on the laptop, some of them you can, some not.

In the end the heat could have damaged the card but then the card wouldn't work.
I'm wondering if maybe the excess heat didn't cause some expansion of the joint between the heatsink and gpu causing it to fail early now.

 

[irishScott]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Are you running the laptop off the battery or the power supply ?
Does it do it if its running off the battery ?

Is it possible to inspect the heatinsk on the laptop, some of them you can, some not.

In the end the heat could have damaged the card but then the card wouldn't work.
I'm wondering if maybe the excess heat didn't cause some expansion of the joint between the heatsink and gpu causing it to fail early now.

I'm looking into the other responses in this thread, but this looks like the culprit. I opened up my lappy, got a nice look at the heat sink. Took some doing, but I was was able to remove it. Heatsink covers the CPU, GPU, and some other large unmarked chip.

There was a thermal fabric over the core of each chip that I couldn't see when I was removing the heatsink. In the case of the CPU and unmarked chip, said fabric ripped considerably. It came off the GPU perfectly clean. Seal was definitely broken with the GPU before I got to it. Looks like I'll be ordering some Arctic Silver in the near future.