I have the worst of luck...

when it comes to video cards, i have the worst of luck. i'm now on my 3rd ruined video card. i don't think overclocking and modding video cards were for me. i'd like to begin with a little story...my very first video card that i bought for my compaq presario 5000 series, was a geforce mx 400. it was cheap, my mom bought it for me for $49 in stores. yay i was happy, playing cs 1.5 with about 75-100 fps. man i loved it. nothing wrong with the video card, works fine. but you know how it goes, you always want better right? so i get a geforce fx 5700ultra for christmas. hmm, spent $200 on that at best buy. man i sure loved this thing. it was a great overclocker as well. although i still had my compaq presario, i was preparing to build myself a computer. piece by piece i got the parts for it...(case, motherboard, cpu). WELL, after purchasing some arctic silver 5 i put some of it on my 5700u. man this thing overclocks VERY well. i can't exactly remember the clock speeds, but i know my ram was runnin around 1.07ghz. i was scoring over 4600 points in 3dmark03. well one day while messing around with my 80mm blue led fans inside of my newly built computer...the whole thing shuts off (yes it was still on, i know and i learned from that) terrified, i had no clue what just happened. i know about ESD and i took the precautions not to touch any of the chips or anything. WELL, my computer refused to boot. very confused i was, i then began to troubleshoot. after spending hours of trying to figure out what was wrong, i then figured it was my video card. my computer will not boot up when the power is connected to my video card. i have tried it in 2 other machines and it does the same thing. i know for a fact that i voided the warranty, considering that i overclocked it to the max and i removed the hsf. still clueless on what i did wrong, i just then accepted the fact that i screwed it up and there was nothing i could do about it. i DID give eVGA tech support a try and i got nothing. i was very disappointed with the customer service, i felt like the guy who i was talking to didn't believe a thing i said. he told me it was some driver issues... right...so no luck there. SO, i have no onboard video on my motherboard so i throw in my gf2. it works. since i was still in the process of building my computer...i then decided to buy a new video card. i bought the xfx fx 5900xt. and i'm sure a few of u know have seen me posts my results with that thing. man i fell in love with this thing the moment i laid my eyes on it. graphics were pretty, performed flawlessly. i began to overclock the thing. i was gettin great results. i was runnin around 499/936. i scored 6700 in 3dmark03. i was amazed after comparing my results to other 5900xt owners. THEN i began seeing this thing called "flashing". hmm, after tons of research, i finally got the balls to do it myself. i ran into a few errors at first, but FINALLY i succeeded! yay for me! after the flash i was runnin around 500/971. hmm looking great! BUT, i scored about 200 points less in 3dmark03 with the lower clock settings. i figured maybe it was heat that was holding me back and the clock settings were too high. BUT, i then found out that my video card was running in agp 4x. hmmm, i could only change it up to 4x. so it turns out my flash wasn't 100% successful. having found that out, i attempted to flash back to my original bios...damn errors! i was unsuccessful with that. i tried at 2 different time periods, about a month apart. so i just stuck with what i had. hmm, summer comes around and now i have a job working on computers and such. WELL, having to find an old cpu heatsink lying around, i decided to take that home and slap it on my video card during my lunch break today. hmmm, i held it on using zip-ties, which works better than the stupid plastic pins on it. place it in my computer...and viola! very happy i am. it works and i played a game for awhile and the heatsink wasn't even warm. (i did not use a fan) hmm, since i just threw it together without properly applying the as5 and taking the time to do a decent job, i decided to re-do it when i got home from work. so i get home, take the thing out...do everything again blah blah. put it back in my computer...and then...to my horror, i see vertical lines on the startup screen! noOoO! i'm sitting there freakin out, PRAYING that this video card did not F up on me!! AHH, i'm gettin so anxious now. i take my whole computer apart, vacuum everything out, cleaned up everything. put everything back in all nicely and neat. and during this process, i noticed that a little as5 was on the golden pins! with little hope, i wiped this off clean hoping this would be the solution to the issue. with little excitement, i put the thing back in. windows xp loading screen...VERTICAL LINES! then i knew i F'ed up. i tried everything to make sure i cleaned up properly and there weren't any scratches anywhere on the video card. it looked as good as new. (i put the stock heatsink/fan back on, i didn't mention it in my story i got a little carried away) so i then accepted the fact that i screwed up yet another great video card and lots of money. so i grab my old gf2 and put it back in. hmm, upon boot-up, the words look a little fuzzy. i'm sitting there thinkin (this can't be happening) well, it boots into windows and my computer detects it. but it doesn't install correctly? i cleaned up my old drivers and downloaded new ones from nvidia.com re-boot, my computer isn't giving me any info about my video card, in fact it's not even detecting it. so after troubleshooting for an hour or so, i came to realize that i yet killed another video card some how. now i'm very depressed that i don't have a video card to play any games. (i am using the gf2 now, since it's the only thing that'll give me picture and allow me to post) wasted about $380 on video cards that are lying around in my room. i think i deserve the title of the official video card killer. i love to overclock, in fact everything in my computer is overclocked with the exception of my video card now. i always have this urge to make it better and it's gone too far. i just gotta learn to stop, but it's addicting!! oh well, maybe i'll consider picking up a 6800gt. but i'm doing heavy thinking on that one, i would REALLY HATE MYSELF if i ever screwed that up. oh well, let me learn from my mistakes (hopefully i will ACTUALLY LEARN and not repeat the same mistakes). i guess from now on i'll be sure to take the precautions needed and do everything with 100% precision and accuracy to ensure quality work out of my money and hardware. i did not go over all the details of my story, so it probably sounds like i was clumsy and didn't do anything to prevent certain things from happening. but i did, i just didn't want to make this SUPER LONG. i think i'll end it here. i give props to anyone who can read this whole thing without fallin asleep. i tried to make it at least a bit interesting.

a reminder to everyone...make sure you accept the risks that are involved when modding/overclocking/killing parts on your computer. it's not worth it to screw things up. it kills your pride and money. good luck to everyone and happy modding.

-very sad oc'er

*ps. i still love nvidia...i know it's not their fault. my next card will still be nvidia*

*bah, damn the limit on how many smilies i can use!*

geez thats a loooooooooong post, im too lazy to read it....

Paragraphs my friend. That will break it up and make it far easier to read.

Ok, finnaly read the whole thing. One question for ya, have you thought about the remote possibility that the mobo got screwed up with the first VC and is now destroying any future VC? I know that is remote, but just give it a thought.

If you have all the bad luck, I must have some of your good luck. I have stuck my hand in there while on, sometimes my rig will freeze or do a reboot, but I have never fried anything. YET! lol.

Good luck with future endeavors.

yeah, might wanna check the power supply along with the mobo, check the agp voltage, spikes in the 3.3V rails and see if there are grounding spikes

it doesn't have to be you, it could be something else

e.g. a defective mobo like Seabee says

or if i were to bet i'd check the psu and the general voltage lines in, e.g. are you living on a farm where there are constant voltage drops or spikes?

industrial power grid?


or maybe even a faulty monitor sending voltage back through the vga cable


it doesn't have to be you



_

heheh, i'm not really depressed about it. judging by the way you guys are responding it seems that you think so. my gf2 actually screwed up before it went into my built rig. i bought a ghetto fx 5200 today for $99. i'm actually quite impressed with the way this thing overclocked, it went up a lot higher than expected. its runnin 299/600, the stock numbers were 250/500. heh, i guess i'm an overclocking freak. i am a bit scared to actually take the hsf off though. i still have that giant hs lying around that i could put on.

also need some ramsinks since this dinky little card doesn't have any. but this thing serves well i guess. i can still play RYL at 1024x768, but on low quality. and i can play doom3 on 800x640 on medium settings. good enuff. Thanks for the replies everyone.

--Jonathan

get some AS Ceramique, i fried an old voodoo3 and a mobo's AGP slot using AS3, and since i've been using ceramique with no problems
btw that was a SUPER LONG post, jease!

AH, wasn't had to read that at all. DOn't worry man, I fried a perfectly good ti4200 (it HAD to be my dads nontheless, guess how pissed he was). I think drivers messed it up, I aws playing a game at 800*600 medium settings (a directx 8.1 game) when artifacts appeared out of the yin yang and everything was shot to ****. Now we have TWO burnt PNY Ti4200's. When I was puttin as5 on my fx5900, I double checked to make sure none got on any electronic stuff or on the pcb, so I looked at it with a high powered light and found MANY places where there was as5... Glad I put on that as5 too. Keeps my fx 5900 (UNFLASHED) nice and cool ~44-45 degrees. Who cares about the risks of oc'ing, its fun! I've had pretty bad luck myself, I had a 420w ThermalTake PSU burn on me (with MASSIVE luck nothing else fried), A Panaflow 92mm melt its own wires (how I don't know- I just fixed it with tape), and also the ti4200 I burned a while ago (it WAS the drivers you know.... ) If you do get a 6800, then DEFINITELY keep overclocking (Voice of the guy who tells you what number to call on infomercials: buddhafumes will not be held responsible for any damages you inflict on your card, or if you void the warranty) . Well, a burnt mx isn't bad, but an fx5900 is fairly bad, and the 5700 is kinda bad.

Youre not that bad. A friend of mine is a PC killer, he killed about 3 systems i put together for him if not more. a 400mhz celeron back in the day, 800mhz thunderbird, and i kinda sence that his 1900+ will die soon too. I always tell him to keep the fans and sinks dust free yet hes a lazy *** and dosent listen out of pitty for the poor hardware i do that for him sometimes. Last i saw the volcano 9 on his cpu was stuffed up and so were all the fan ducts (i did not clean it yet i told him to do it) His cpu is older athlon xp 1900+ with palomino core. He has that sucker running as high as 70c or more at times its a disaster waiting to happen.
As for my systems they all run nice and smooth i only killed one p III 800EB along with mobo and ram, but that was my psu dying and taking mobo/cpu/ram with it hell i had my head inside the case while teh think just popped sparks and made soem noise i banged my head on the table as it scarred me quite a bit.

Yeah, I consider myself very lucky as nothing burned when my power supply went up in smoke (because thats what it did do, the fire coming from it did that). I've been kinda lazy with dust, I vacuum once in a while, and right now my cpu idles at wide ranges (sometimes 43, other times as high as 47). Right now my cpu is at 50, and I don't know why. (Thermaltake silent boost must be wearing out or something). I don't think I'll do anything more/add anything to this rig until a while because this needs to last a long long time.

we should start our own little pc hardware killa krew. i guess this 5200 isn't too bad. it plays doom3 quite well, i'm afraid to benchmark though...i don't want to see the numbers this can put out

Gutted to hear of the second XFX 5900XT to die on this forum.

To the best of my ability, I'd diagnose the core as fried and F'ed up.

500mhz Mine hits mammoth temperatures when it's clocked a t 475/950 (stock cooling)

You know what they say... things always break in threes.
Funny though..... I have an ECS K7S5A in sixes.

that is the longest post I have ever seen on any board...

wasn't that hard to read. I am actually thinking of buying a Hercules 4500 (A Kyro II 4500) with 64 mb of ram. Performance is better than a geforce mx 2, and I want to buy it just to oc the **** out of it. For $20, its a better deal than an mx. I as thinking of ordering it, putting a volt mod on it, chop up some old cpu heatsink for ram sinks, and of course puting a volcano 7 on it

EDIT: On a stock fx5900 bios, my card could only get 470/920 (stock cooling).... So for you on a stock 5900xt bios, thats pretty good. Consider flashing the bios to a 5950u, that will give you more voltage for your gpu. I don't need a 5950u bios because my bios has the max voltage the card can get (1.55 volts), and better ram timings than the 5950u or a 5900.