killed my GeForce 5950

[Max47]

what i have is a 256 MB Geforce FX 5950 Ultra made by BFG and is the Extreem edition made for Alienware computers... well the story is i just put in my water cooling system, and was going to give it a run for its money so i poped in BF1942 and ran everything as high as it would go. well i heard a noise comming from the video card sounded a crackling noise (like you have two wires and the electricity is jumping from one to the other without touching) well i opened it up and noticed i had a leak on the water block.. luckily the gigantic heatsing on the card held the water on it and i dont think that has anything to do with the card dying on me, caus all of the water was on the heatsink in a little puddle... it was running fine until i turned it off.. but anyhow i fixed the leak and made sure there was no water on the card.. cleaned it with alcohol.. but it was that noise that the card was making that was buggin me so i took the heatsink off and cleaned everything and figured since i had it off i might as well lapp the GPU and put some good thermal paste on it, i used Arctic Silver 5 for it.. after i got done i put it back in and loaded it up when i loaded it up i had about 5 or so verticle snowy lines on the screen, they only showed on the boot screen and the windows loading screen after windows loaded they disapeared, but i checked the card in the device manager it showed that card as it normally does but it said, "this device failed to load" im not exactly for sure what i did to it.. but if anyone has any idea what might be wrong with it and might be able to share how to fix it please do so lol.. another thing if i cant fix it is there any way i might be able to salvage the card and get at least some of my money back for it?

Another thing i noticed was after i took it back out after a failed attempt to start it up... there was a small little ball of the old thermal paste in between the GPU and the card, i was thinking it might have possibly shorted out the GPU... anyhow i cleaned it off and tried to boot it again.. still same thing

[Trueweltall]

Ouch, your card got owned. Try to sell it off to some idiot ;)

[Rezin777]

Originally posted by Trueweltall
Ouch, your card got owned. Try to sell it off to some idiot ;)

I hope you don't mean advertise it as a working card. There is nothing I hate more than buying hardware advertised as working when it doesn't. If it happened to me and the person who sold it lived close enough, they would find me at their front door. Max47, I wouldn't take this as sound advice.

[Steven4563]

make sure u havent got any AS5 on any part off that card apart from the GPU

[zachj]

If you lapped the GPU, you might have irrepairably damaged it. If it's broken, contact the manufacturer. Tell them what you did and ask what can be done. They'll either say "you broke it, we don't care", or they'll say "send it in". I imagine you're more likely to get a "we don't care", as you voided the warranty a whole lot on that card, but it won't hurt to ask. Some people are really nice. If you send it back for RMA without telling them what happened, I doub't it'll be hard to notice what you did, and they'll send it back broken and stick you with return shipping. And RMAing something you broke is wrong anyway ;)

Good Luck

Z

[Overclocker550]

yea lapping the gpu may have damaged it. I dont get why people lap it, I never ever do! sorry to hear of your loss. might wanna go ati now

[dreIU]

What would happen if he was to call the company and not tell them what he did... say he would just tell them that it stopped working. Aside from that being morally wrong and unethical, would the company take the card apart and try to bust him out?

I have always wanted to know about this; it just seems so easy to take advantage of the warranties/RMA's anymore.

[Darph]

Dude...
Whenever 400$ hardware covered by a warranty breaks,you don't rip it apart to see what happened, ya send it in. :-p

[Max47]

Darph.. it isnt covered under any warranty i can take advantage of.. these dont sell retail they are OEM out of Alienware Desktops

[Aslan]

Originally posted by zachj
If you lapped the GPU, you might have irrepairably damaged it. If it's broken, contact the manufacturer. Tell them what you did and ask what can be done. They'll either say "you broke it, we don't care", or they'll say "send it in". I imagine you're more likely to get a "we don't care", as you voided the warranty a whole lot on that card, but it won't hurt to ask. Some people are really nice. If you send it back for RMA without telling them what happened, I doub't it'll be hard to notice what you did, and they'll send it back broken and stick you with return shipping. And RMAing something you broke is wrong anyway ;)

Good Luck

Z

Agreed, you might as well just contact Alienware, truthfully tell them what happened and you might get lucky and get an RMA. If that fails, just sell it on Ebay. I've seen quite a few broken high-end cards sell for $100+ to people who think they can RMA them. :p :rolleyes:

[zachj]

I agree . . . contact Alienware.

If you RMA the card, even if you don't say what's wrong with it, they're going to check for physical damage/modifications before they approve it. What you've done is, um . . . easy to spot :D

Sorry to hear about your loss. I guess one needs to make a sacrifice to the video gods once in a while to keep them happy . . .

It's a shame

Z

[Darph]

i Sacrificed a 4600 not too long ago. :-P