ATI Radeon 9800 Pro(?) critical artifact problems

[jrmwillis]

OK,

I have a Gateway 901x Media Center PC that came with Radeon 9800 Pro
video card. I have been struggling with this card for 8 months now. My
PC is hot, and does not have a lot of ventilation, however I do have
additional fans and the air does flow. The first 2 cards the fan failed
completely and the card started producing crazy artifacts. The
artifacts can appear on a reasonably static page as blocks of
corruption, or can become large strips of color on something like a DVD
playing.

Card 3. Almost immiediately started showing artifacts. I tried to
return it but Gateway didn't want to replace it and said I would have
to send my whole PC to them. I decided I would rather try and resolve
it myself than deal with that.

I bought a Zalman heatsink/fan
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=149&code=013 and put
it on. That was 2 months ago. It has worked without fault for hours at
a time.

Yesterday the dreaded artifacts came back, within minutes of turning
the PC on.

Any ideas?

 

[BigJim]

could be a driver issue, had a nvidia 6600gt that was doing that until I got
the
right drivers for it. It would only do it in the game HL2 and Doom3.

 

[Gordon Scott]

OK,

I have a Gateway 901x Media Center PC that came with Radeon 9800 Pro
video card. I have been struggling with this card for 8 months now. My
PC is hot, and does not have a lot of ventilation, however I do have
additional fans and the air does flow. The first 2 cards the fan failed
completely and the card started producing crazy artifacts. The
artifacts can appear on a reasonably static page as blocks of
corruption, or can become large strips of color on something like a DVD
playing.

Card 3. Almost immiediately started showing artifacts. I tried to
return it but Gateway didn't want to replace it and said I would have
to send my whole PC to them. I decided I would rather try and resolve
it myself than deal with that.

I bought a Zalman heatsink/fan
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=149&code=013 and put
it on. That was 2 months ago. It has worked without fault for hours at
a time.

Yesterday the dreaded artifacts came back, within minutes of turning
the PC on.

Any ideas?

yea..

Stop buying branded crap and get a local shop to build to order a pc for
you, knowing they can service what they sell locally.

 

[First of One]

Try card 3 in another PC and see if the artifacts appear. Also,
install/update motherboard chipset drivers. If the artifacts do not go away,
I would suspect maybe the card is being supplied with dirty power, either
through the AGP port or from the power supply.

 

[jrmwillis]

The weird thing is that it worked fine for 2 months after I installed
the new heatsink. I just redid the thermal paste, and it lasted about 2
hours before going nuts. I am hoping (dreaming) that the paste is just
not fully set yest. But I think in reality I need to go buy a different
video card.

 

[Shawk]

The weird thing is that it worked fine for 2 months after I installed
the new heatsink. I just redid the thermal paste, and it lasted about 2
hours before going nuts. I am hoping (dreaming) that the paste is just
not fully set yest. But I think in reality I need to go buy a different
video card.

Perhaps the paste wasn't applied so well this time? Thin smear only? Good
contact all around? Heat artifacts on a 9800Pro are usually speckles
(flashing dots of reds, greens etc). It's the 3rd card though. How many
will you install before you look at the rest of the PC?

 

[Sleepy]

OK,

I have a Gateway 901x Media Center PC that came with Radeon 9800 Pro
video card. I have been struggling with this card for 8 months now. My
PC is hot, and does not have a lot of ventilation, however I do have
additional fans and the air does flow. The first 2 cards the fan failed
completely and the card started producing crazy artifacts. The
artifacts can appear on a reasonably static page as blocks of
corruption, or can become large strips of color on something like a DVD
playing.

Card 3. Almost immiediately started showing artifacts. I tried to
return it but Gateway didn't want to replace it and said I would have
to send my whole PC to them. I decided I would rather try and resolve
it myself than deal with that.

I bought a Zalman heatsink/fan
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/view.asp?idx=149&code=013 and put
it on. That was 2 months ago. It has worked without fault for hours at
a time.

Yesterday the dreaded artifacts came back, within minutes of turning
the PC on.

Any ideas?

firstly - ATIs drivers have run cards noticeably hotter since the 5.6s - the
4.12s are about the best driver for stability released in the last 12
months.
secondly - case cooling is as important as the fan on your CPU or GPU. if
the case has poor airflow then the fan on your card is simply circulating
hot air around a hot chip. if this is the case you need to fix it because
other parts like your HDDs will also be affected in time.

 

[me]

have you checked the fan in the power supply?
Make sure its running and leave the case open and put a fan blowing into the
case see if your problem goes away.
I had a sapphire radeon pro 9800 256 meg video card that did the same thing.
The fan in my power supply had died. Sometimes it would work and then slow
way down to a crawl.
After changing the fan in the power supply and adding extra fans in the case
things worked great.

Hope this helps.

 

[Geno]

Just out of curiosity where did you purchase your 9800 Pro?
Most of the cards purchased off of dealers on eBay for example turned
out to be Knock-Off cards not manufactured by ATI. The clue is in the
Memory Bus Width. Genuine ATI cards have a 256-bit bus width. The
phony cards have a 128-bit bus width. I saw other posts in which
people who bought these phony cards were having serious artifact
problems on their monitors. I say all of this only as a matter of
information. This may or may not apply to your problem. Just something
to look into.

 

[jrmwillis]

I ended up putting an additional fan in the case to try and get more
airflow, I also underclocked the core and memory. It ran for 6+ hours
last night playing DVD and WMP visualizations.

The card is a component in a Gateway PC, so i assume they send me real
ATI cards.

 

[me]

how big is your power supply?