2 cards dead, what happened?

[eboots]

I recently purchased a Samsung widescreen 20 inch lcd from newegg. I
hooked it up to my 3 year old pc (asus p4b-800 mobo, 2.8ghz intel, 2
gigs xms corsair, at 9800pro), everything has been working fine for 3
years (endless hours of playing WoW and endless hours of HL2, BF2, etc)
until after exiting out of a 3 hour session of BF2. Upon exiting BF2
the screen suddenly filled with a green checkerboard laid overtop of
everything, video corruption. My first thoughts were that I overheated
the card after playing BF2 for 3 hours, using the widescreen resolution
in the game. As a side note nothing on my machine is overclocked, and
I have very very good cooling. After power cycling and cooling down
the machine, I still got video corruption, tried the card in another
pc, same thing, the video is clearly corrupted, and it is showing on
the post screens and bios screens as well. So I figures oh well, 3
years and countless hours out of a great ati 9800pro, time to just get
a new vid card. I ordered up an ati x800gto from newegg.

I installed a geforce ti4200 from my backup machine and installed
nvidia drivers, I ran this setup for 2 weeks, no problems, but I didn't
play any games.

I installed my x800gto when it arrived, and reinstalled the ati
drivers. Played BF2, LOTR-battle for middle earth, Titan Quest, etc.
All games worked fine, for about 1.5 weeks. Then when trying to load a
saved game of LOTR, I got video corruption, everything is blocking and
messed up, I was pissed. I went thru the usual routine, testing it on
my backup pc, and the same thing there, the video is corrupt even in
the bios and post screens, so the card is cooked.

I am really perplexed, this seems unlikely to be a coincidence, what is
causing two cards to die? Is it possible that adding the LCD monitor
is somehow messing up the video cards? I find this unlikely but is it
possible? Could it be my motherboard? Could it be my power supply?
Both the 9800pro and x800gto use a power connection from the power
supply, the geforce ti4200 does not.

 

[Kent_Diego]

....

I am really perplexed, this seems unlikely to be a coincidence, what is
causing two cards to die? Is it possible that adding the LCD monitor
is somehow messing up the video cards? I find this unlikely but is it
possible? Could it be my motherboard? Could it be my power supply?
Both the 9800pro and x800gto use a power connection from the power
supply, the geforce ti4200 does not.

High end video cards seem have a very high failure rate. Keep RMAing the
cards until you get one that works. I have seen that the motherboard makes
some difference. I have taken a video card that overclocked very high and
always worked great and put it in an other computer where there were major
video problems even at much lower clock rates.

 

[pigdos]

My 9800 Pro exhibited the same problems. When I removed the heatsink I
discovered all the TIM has completely dried out to a flakey, powdery mess.
Which would be great for a pie crust but didn't do much for thermal
conductivity. I replaced the TIM and the 9800 Pro worked fine and I could
even overclock it more. I'll bet your 3 year old 9800 Pro has the same
problem. I can't say anything about your X800 gto.