Hello everyone, I am buying a brand new PC in a month or so time, but I bought my a new Dell 24" WFP the other day because I was able to get such a great discount on it. I figured my Radeon 9600 Pro could handle it so I plugged the monitor in and booted up, everything was fine for a few minutes in native but then I heard my graphics card resetting (I believe. It sounds like a power off/power on cycle). I've had hell with that graphics card, the fan on it has always been extremely loud and should really be replaced, but I figured out that I could just unplug the GPU fan and it would run fine anyway. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to take the GPU heatsink off and give it a quick dusting off, in the process I broke one of the plastic pins that hold the heatsink in to place. Not to mention, I also managed to snap off the wire of the GPU fan. Trust me, I'm not stupid.... I was just having a really bad day and hardware has never been my thing. I tied the GPU heatsink back in to place with the wire I had snapped off of the fan (I bet your rolling your eyes by now) and put a case fan directly aimed at the heatsink (about 1cm away). So I boot up, the computer fails to detect my IDE drives and says "INSERT SYSTEM DISK...". Bugger, rebooted a few more times and figured out that it now only detects the drives spasmodically. The other problem being that when I am windows now, I get strange blue line artifacts, as well as the graphics card still resetting. I tried taking out the graphics card again and putting it back in to place. Previously I had put the card tilted slightly down so my DVI cable would fit. No luck. I made sure my IDE cables were firmly in their sockets and gave my CPU heatsink a quick dusting, but nothing is different. Is all hope lost for my faithful companion? Thanks for your help, much appreciated. You all probably think I am a dill now Edit: Now whenever windows begins to load (right before the actual loading screen), my computer resets.

Trust me I've done worse to the point I still can't figure out how my foot got halfway through the motherboard.

1: Have you try'd, just plugging into the motherboard's on board GPU, and see if that works (clears the atifacts up).

2:You mention you broke off a PIN, did you break one of the PINs on the GPU it's self? You might of broke somthing causeing the card and the CPU to not be able to communicate with each other correctly.

3: have you re-installed your OS, to see if that helps? If you're afraid of loosing all your data on your harddrive and you don't got a seperate one, try borrowing one off a friend and see if it works without a re-installation.

1. Nah, I haven't yet.

2. No no, just broke one of the plastic pins that hold the heatsink in to place.

3. Nah I don't believe it is the OS. It could be, but I think there are more likely causes first. If worst comes to worse, I will try it.

Haha your foot through the motherboard? That's classic.

Update: just tried onboard and it appears to work fine :) So my gfx card is thoroughly smashed, sweet.

I wouldn't go reinstalling your OS. You basicly tortured you VC to the point of death, reinstalling isn't going to do anything good. I think your stuck limping along hoping it doesn't die before you get your new rig. I would replacing the card but the buying a new system think sounds like it makes that a bad plan. Unless you want two computers in which case go for it.

And when you reapplied the heatsink, did you at any time clean off the now useless and dry thermal paste and put on a new drop? If you didn't then the heatsink is probably doing a whole lot of nothing (no real contact, especially with the dry paste [or dried out pad] in the way, meaning it's pure air cooling the raw GPU)

Of course, that no longer matters because now that you've lost your pin there's no way that the heatsink is going to do you a lick of good because it won't be held tight enough to conduct heat properly just by lashing it on with the wire.

You have 2 options:
1) If the card isn't already fried, you can head to the local computer store and get yourself an aftermarket Heatsink. Take your card along to make sure you get one that fits.

2) Take the opportunity to upgrade if you can afford it. 9600s are OLD, you could probably find a second-hand 9800 for less than $50.


The artifacts you're now seeing are probably heat-related. You sometimes see similar effects if you Overclock a video card too far. As for the video card reseting, its likely either a bad card or the increased resolution is causing your card to draw more power than your PSU is able to supply. If the latter is the case, you might be able to remedy the situation by plugging a different molex into the graphics card, prefurably one without anything on it.

Some good news and bad news. Good news is I've ordered my new PC :)

• XFX 8800GTX eXtreme 600Mhz GDDR3 768MB VGA
  
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 - 'Conroe' Dual Core Processor - 2.66GHz, 64-Bit, 1066FSB, 4MB Cache, VT, LGA775
  
• Crucial 4-4-4 EPP PC2-6400 Ballistix MICRON 2GB DDR2 Kit (2x1024Mb) DDR2-800Mhz, 2048Mb
  
• Asus STRIKER eXtreme: nF 680i SLI
  
• Hiper Type R 580W Modular PSU Black
  
• WD Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000RPM SATA Hard Drive - 4.6ms, 16MB Cache, NCQ
  
• Zalman CNPS9700-LED Copper CPU Cooler
  
• Thermaltake Soprano DX Aluminium
  
• Razer DeathAdder Mouse
  
• Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
  

Bad news is the mob I ordered the parts with I heard were very good from a friend who ordered with them about a year ago. However the day after I ordered I read some horror stories about them and apparently in the last year (how typical) they have gone down hill and some people have had to wait over 2 months for some hardware and others have even more trouble trying to get replacement parts under warranty, getting refunds etc. See how we go I suppose :(

Quote: Original post by ravyne2001
2) Take the opportunity to upgrade if you can afford it. 9600s are OLD, you could probably find a second-hand 9800 for less than $50.

Upgrading from a 9600 to a 9800 makes no sense, as they have the same shader capabilities (2.0 only), and the only difference is one of a little bit of speed.

You can get a new AGP GeForce 7600, which is shader model 3.0, and a lot faster than the 9600, for < $100; that would be a better upgrade. However, seeing as he's now getting an entirely new computer, that's mostly academic :-)

Heh, definately agreed hplus. In fact I've so far been unable to justify upgrading from my 9800 to any AGP solution both due to the fact that I'll be upgrading the whole machine soon enough, and the fact that the performance increase really isn't enough to justify even that upgrade. I was simply trying to point out that he could probably get a small upgrade for roughly the same cost as an after-market heatsink if he couldn't afford a real upgrade.

But as you've said, its all academic now. Although, I think the original 9600s were on the RV280 core, rather than the RV300 core used on the 9700/9800 and later derivitives of which (RV360) were used on the 9600XT/9800XT. Feature-wise pretty much the same, but a 9800 is easily twice as fast as the 9600.

Sigh, I've had a few problems with the supplier I was getting my components from... Turns out most people wait up to 3 months to get the goods from them! So now I have to find somewhere else grr. Atleast this will give me a chance to change a few components.

Hope they refund my money soon... they are an online store and are terrible with customer service, it literally took me 2 hours to call them the other day.