Sapphire ATI Radeon 9000 cooling

Hi

I've got a bit of a major problem with my ATI Radeon 9000 from Sapphire. Most games I run after about 5 minutes start having colour flashes on screen folllowed by a total lockout of the system.

I'm not overclocking the card but someone has mentioned to me that it could be that the card is overheating. The colour flashes get worse when the card is used for doing more graphic intense work like GTA3 and RTCW, I can play less graphic intensive games for sometime before the problem arising (GTA2, Tomb Raider 3) but it still arises.

A few times I've touched the heatsink on the GPU to see how hot it's got when it's crashed and burnt my fingers. I'm quite sure the heatsink shouldn't be getting this hot!

So has anyone got any idea what type of fan should I attach to it, and where can I get it from. Are there special fans for this available?

OR is it possible to Underclock the system so at least I can play games whilst I get the fan figured out.

Yes you can underclock it with any video card overclocking program like powerstrip. but why you would do that?????? i dunno. http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm

It doesn't look like it's a seating problem. If the heatsink was seated bad it won't get hot at all. same goes for it having cheap thermal paste. I would say you just need to go out to your local computer store and pick up a crystal orb or blue orb. You don't need anything to powerful. just something that will do. and A C orb will work. You just remove the old, clean off the chip and put on the new. very easy thing to do.

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduct.asp?description=35-116-003&depa=1

Deadphishy said:

Yes you can underclock it with any video card overclocking program like powerstrip. but why you would do that?????? i dunno.

Click to expand...

He would do it to reduce or remove his system crashes, that's obvious.

As to whether or not it will work, I don't know. Try it and see.

There is obviously a problem here. All graphics cards should run fine at stock speeds. Is there adequate case ventialtion and such? If not, that could be the problem. Try playing one of those games that locks up your system, but take you side panel off and point a large house fan at the video card while you play. If you're fine like that, then it's a cooling problem. If that won't fix it, it is probably an actual problem with the card.