4870 artifacts when booting. Thinking of putting it in the oven and baking it...

My visiontek radeon HD 4870 will artifact when I turn the computer on, I need to power cycle like 2 or 3 or sometimes 5 times for it to stop artifacting in the bios..

I think it needs to "warm up" before it can display a correct picture.

How do i fix this?

I saw a post where someone stuck his card in the oven and baked it at just under the tolerance level for the card and it worked great after that.

Sometimes artifacts are caused by separation of solder joints on the GPU. This is very similar to the red ring of death that so frequently happened on the Xbox 360.

The idea behind baking it, is that you are essentially rejoining the solder back together.

However, if you have any type of warranty on the card, I would send it to them first. If not, you can try a couple different things with it.

If you are going to bake it, make sure to clean off the thermal paste. Get some NON-CORROSIVE (important) flux and use an injector of some sort and put it underneath the card. Slowly heat up the oven to about 300-350 degrees in increments of 50 degrees. This way, the board doesnt warp. After it is heated all the way, I would let it sit in there for about 5-8 minutes. Then slowly let it cool. Put everything back together and use Artic Silver 5 thermal paste.

Please note, that by doing this there is a HIGH chance of blowing capacitors and what not. It sometimes works, and it sometimes doesnt.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=606658

Is a popular thread from a person (and a bunch of other people that have also done the oven trick) to bring some life back into their cards. It is definitely worth a read. Although I agree with mgsickler to RMA it if it is still under warranty.