Radeon 9700 What could be wrong?

[Dima R]

I installed heatsinks on my Radeon 9700 using Arctic Silver Thermal dhesive
and now I get artifacts in games.
This wasn't my first time sticking heatsinks on the memory chips and the
board looks perfectely nice and clean.

Could the memory itself be damaged with the adhesive?

When I flash the board to Radeon 9500 64MB and then use Softmod, the games
look fine, but slower than before.

If you have any ideas please let me know.

Thanks!

 

[Phil]

Something to consider: Artic Silver is ever so slightly electrically
conductive. So, you need to make sure there's no Arctic Silver touching any
the mem chip leads.

-phil

 

[Dima R]

I can't really see the leads, they must be under the chips. I checked the
board with a magnifying lens over and over, couldn't find any paste/shorts.
Is there any liquid or whatever that I could use to clean the board of
possible paste on the board that I could overseen?

Is it possible that the whole thing could be because of a damaged capacitor?
I removed the small heatsink on the back of the card. There's capacitor near
the bottom hole that holds the heatsink. When I pushed back the clip of the
sink, I think I bended the lead of the capacitor, but I'm not really sure
because it's hard to see there.

I found a new BIOS that makes 9500 64MB into 9500 Pro 64MB with 8 pipelines.
When I flashed my card with it, windows now recognizes my card as 9700 Pro
64MB, the memory works at 128bit mode, which means the chips on the front of
the board. I got a BIOS editor and edited the BIOS to 256bit. After that, I
still get the artifats in windows, but no artifacts in DOS (with 9700 128MB
BIOS, DOS letters had different colours). Still in 128bit mode 64MB I get a
higher score in 3dMark than as 9500 softmoded. (same clock 320core/300mem).

Is there any diagnostic software that could check the card and show where
the errors come from?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Dima R]

I'm going to check the board again and again until I find something!

 

[Minotaur]

I installed heatsinks on my Radeon 9700 using Arctic Silver Thermal dhesive
and now I get artifacts in games.
This wasn't my first time sticking heatsinks on the memory chips and the
board looks perfectely nice and clean.

Could the memory itself be damaged with the adhesive?

When I flash the board to Radeon 9500 64MB and then use Softmod, the games
look fine, but slower than before.

If you have any ideas please let me know.

Thanks!

Why did you flash your 9700 with a 9500 BIOS ? !

Thats the problem...

 

[Dima R]

To make it 64MB which works great. Then I used softmod to turn on 4 more
pipielines.