baddog941
02-18-2003, 03:05 PM
OK fellow tweakers, I've been using PowerStrip (a tweak i got off a MaximumPC cdrom) to OC my Saphire Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB DDR 30 to 50 MHz above defaults. I decide to upgrade the passive cooling on it with a cool looking blue gpu heat sink/fan unit I got at CompUSA. the fan on this little cooler really puts out! I put a CDROM "coaster" at the edge of the gpu so i wouldn't booger up the pcb and pried the old heat sink off with a screwdriver - TINK! that sucker sounded like glass breaking, but looked like it came off clean. Then I taped off the area around the gpu and sanded the old glue off using the old hs as a sanding block. cleaned it all up with fingernail polish remover (acetone?), stuck the new hs/fan on (it has an acrylic adhesive patch), and crossed my fingers. re-installed the card and (drum roll please) nothing! no video at all, nada zilch, big 0! (had a hard drive led lit up constant though). re-inserted it a couple of times to make sure it was seated good in the AGP slot and still nothing. 4 a.m. burnt out, done for the day.
Today, i removed and inspected the card with a jewelers glass and saw no apparent damage. Hooked it back up and the damned thing came on! well, sort of - it has a bunch of vertical lines (broken lines) and visible refresh waves on XP start-up and Linux boot screens, but once my windows gui (XP Pro) starts to load, everything looks fine! windows looks good and i get better than 5100 on 3DMark2001, UT and UT2003 kicks *** - but my Linux boot screen, command prompts (DOS and Linux) are FUBARed with the vertical anomalies (RedHat 8.0 Gnome & KDE gui affected but usable). apparently, the card is messed up when running at default vga mode with no drivers (no radeon support with RedHat Linux). any ideas on what happened? did prying off the old heat sink damage it? was it the sanding (still had ATI marking on gpu)? did the chemicals get to it? i'm just looking for some input from others who OC perfectly good equiptment at the risk of hosing it - don't want to make this mistake again (if i could just figure out what it was). thanks for reading my long-winded post - i look forward to hearing from ya....
specs: MSI KT3 Ultra ARU, XP1800+ (oc'd to 1.67GHz-XP2000+), 512Mb Micron PC2100, Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB DDR, Maxtor 7200rpm ATA100 HD, OS=XPProCorpSP1/Redhat 8.0 Linux dual boot
3DMark2001 score of 5186 at 1024X768 (after mods), gpu engine clock at 288MHz (default 250), gpu memory clock at 224MHz (default 200) running stable (only in WindowsXP)
Today, i removed and inspected the card with a jewelers glass and saw no apparent damage. Hooked it back up and the damned thing came on! well, sort of - it has a bunch of vertical lines (broken lines) and visible refresh waves on XP start-up and Linux boot screens, but once my windows gui (XP Pro) starts to load, everything looks fine! windows looks good and i get better than 5100 on 3DMark2001, UT and UT2003 kicks *** - but my Linux boot screen, command prompts (DOS and Linux) are FUBARed with the vertical anomalies (RedHat 8.0 Gnome & KDE gui affected but usable). apparently, the card is messed up when running at default vga mode with no drivers (no radeon support with RedHat Linux). any ideas on what happened? did prying off the old heat sink damage it? was it the sanding (still had ATI marking on gpu)? did the chemicals get to it? i'm just looking for some input from others who OC perfectly good equiptment at the risk of hosing it - don't want to make this mistake again (if i could just figure out what it was). thanks for reading my long-winded post - i look forward to hearing from ya....
specs: MSI KT3 Ultra ARU, XP1800+ (oc'd to 1.67GHz-XP2000+), 512Mb Micron PC2100, Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB DDR, Maxtor 7200rpm ATA100 HD, OS=XPProCorpSP1/Redhat 8.0 Linux dual boot
3DMark2001 score of 5186 at 1024X768 (after mods), gpu engine clock at 288MHz (default 250), gpu memory clock at 224MHz (default 200) running stable (only in WindowsXP)