8800 GTX Up The Swanee?

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Soldato
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25 Apr 2007
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Turned on my PC the other day and there was graphical corruption (dots) over the motherboard boot up screen, followed by garbling of the screen where it shows RAM amounts and such like (I've been out of the computer hardware scene for a while so apologies for the terminology). Windows Vista 64 has blue wavy lines down the screen.

System: eVGA 8800GTX Superclocked, Q6600 with Tuniq Tower, 4x1Gb RAM, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (all running at manufacturer's settings), Enermax Noisetaker 600W.

Took the PC apart and it was full of dust after running uncleaned for 3 years. Vacuumed it all out, took out graphics card and cleaned it, checked all connections (everything fine). Graphical corruption remains. Downloaded and installed latest drivers from nVidia without it fixing it. In Vista, I can only change resolution to basic 800x600, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200.

Is this likely to be anything other than the graphics card? I don't have another one I can slot in to eliminate it from the equation. If all evidence says "get a new graphics card" I'll do it, but can't really afford to stump up for one on the off-chance it'll fix it. What models would offer equivalent performance to the 8800GTX (I don't really game hardcore any more) and would a PCI-e 2 or 2.1 card work on my mobo without problems?

Cheers
 
Don't you have on-board graphics? You could try take out the card and run off the on-board graphics and if everything works then bingo the 8800GTX is a goner.
 
I don't have on-board graphics, or at least there's nothing to plug the monitor in to!

Vista's 'Sleep' option also seems to be grayed out and after a bit of poking around in device manager it seems like Windows has detected a problem with the graphics card and disabled it.
 
Take it out, take the HSF off, clean the TIM off, take one oven, preheat to 200c, take baking tray, line with foil, make some tin foil balls to raise the card off the deck, place up side down so GPU core faces the bottom, bake for 10 mins @ 200c, remove carfully and leave too cool for an hour. Refit HSF and refit to pc, should be fixed.

I done loads of them, CEX pays £35 per 8800GTX, i been buying them off eBay for less than £5 each, tend to do 10 a month. Easy money
 
If you have a heat gun all the better. My 8800 went a few weeks back, heatgun treatment for a couple of minutes and its been fine
 
Common fault with these cards. I've had three through here for repairs personally, two of them were not fixed by repeated heatgun attempts, the other one is still going strong to this day. http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18272398 same type of lines but the colour will vary across cards/faults.

Heatgun it if you can, might squeeze a bit of extra life out of it. If not, they can be found circa £35 in the MM. ;)

I done loads of them, CEX pays £35 per 8800GTX, i been buying them off eBay for less than £5 each, tend to do 10 a month. Easy money
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I'd go careful around those areas, some reflows will last years, others will last only a few months. You might get a few back off CEX if you're not careful.
 
spleenharvester said:
I'd go careful around those areas, some reflows will last years, others will last only a few months. You might get a few back off CEX if you're not careful.
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Not had a reflow fail on me yet. 300+ Xbox 360's and 100 PS3's so far. Dell laptops i've lost track off, 3 pallets worth at least!
 
Thanks for the answers guys. I'd have never thought about sticking it in the oven but I'll give it a go once I can track down my missing tube of Arctic Silver :)
 
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