Fried video card?

[Jakalwarrior]

On my girlfriends inspiron 8200 the graphics are seriously freaking out. She bought an ati 9000 to upgrade her geforce 2 about a year ago. Today it started spazzing. We pulled it apart, put it back together, and it works sometimes. It will work for a while and then you move the laptop and it spazzs, or you play a game a bit and it does it on its own. I know nothing is loose as weve had it apart a million times. It dosent have a real heatsink it had a metal pad over the core that stretched over the rest of the card. It looks like this http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-Inspiron-8100-8200-Latitude-C810-C840-64MB-Video_W0QQitemZ6882719985QQcategoryZ74957QQssPageN ameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem. The pad on the heatsink that connected it to the metal stuff though felt more like an insulator than a conductor. We removed that, squirted on some AS5, put the metal pad back on, no luck. I have to get this fixed or my girlfriend will be miserable and I wont have anyone to play WoW with me.

Note, its not really a 9000. After we scraped off the TIM we read the core and it said 7500. She got ripped off. Was no real way to tell though since the card is otherwise unmarked and she figured the driver support was weird since she was using non standard drivers and it seemed fairly fast.

[shellshock]

Do you still have the orignal geforce 2 by any chance? if so, stick it in and see if it fixes it. if it does, then we know its the ATI card

[Jakalwarrior]

Nope she sold it. My 9800pro is actually starting to do a bit of the same. When it was in an old timey agp 4x board for a while when I blew mine it did the same exact stuff just not as bad and only in 3d mode. Then in my ASrock board it did it to a lesser extent now in my current board it just does it every now and then.
I did some testing yesterday though. Sitting on the desktop or browsing the internet its all good. Play wow for more than a few mins it twacks out. Lower the settings longer it lasts. Run ATI tool 3d test and it does fine for a bit then twacks out a bit, then some more. During even light usage though it will freak out if you bump it.
Its not always steady artifacts. Sometimes a texture will get messed up. Just a single texture. Or the desktop gets all messed up but if you refresh it by moving something into that space and moving it away its all clear. The other artifacts are like when you're looking at water youll see some crazy stuff on the surface. Like a plad pattern with moving pixels dancing around. Or from the center of the cursor location lines will jut out and form triangles to the edges of the screen made of solid colors. All stuff ive seen my 9800pro do, just not as badly. Wasnt bad mounting with it either. I took it out, even reseated the heatsink, changed every setting I could find. Nada.

[downer]

That sounds like an overheating issue to me, since it is artifacting in 3d, and fine in 2d mode.

[Jakalwarrior]

Found the problem. Power supply was dying. It crapped out once while we were testing stuff with it all torn down. Then it wouldnt turn on anymore. OH NO WE KILLED IT!!!! then we noticed when we plugged the power supply into the comp the PSUs lights would dim then go off. Tried battery alone and voula, works great. No more graphical anomolies. I guess in 3d more the card pulled more power and the thing couldnt keep up so everything was being undervolted. The chip and ram etc... had a little headroom but the vid card just wasnt getting enough juice to be stable. No idea why bumping it would affect it.