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ATI card artifacts when computer is cold. Stops when warm...

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blackjackel

Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2002
Location
Los Angeles
Every time I boot my computer I get video artifacting, I have to wait till the graphics card heats up and reboot and the artifacting goes away...

OR

I can "push" the card up or down a little and this will also work.


MY personal opinion is that one of the solder points on the card is loose or something, has anyone experienced this before?

I'm thinking of doing the "bake it in the oven trick" to try to revive the card, what do you guys think?
 
I would agree on solder points, but I would also add a bad heatsink seating to the list, as well. If physical movement fixes the artifacts, it is a physical problem.
 
I would agree on solder points, but I would also add a bad heatsink seating to the list, as well. If physical movement fixes the artifacts, it is a physical problem.

I thought about this so i tightened the heatsink screws and that fixed the problem for 1 boot, after that the same thing happened again.

Then I took the heatsink completely off, scraped the crap thermal paste off and put new paste on and screwed it back on, again, solved the problem for the next boot...

The boot after that, I had the problem again!

So I'm thinking sticking it in the oven will fix it, thing is, this is a nice card and i don't want to ruin it :/
 
If it is under warranty, I would just send it in.

Otherwise, I would do the following:
*Try another card in this system
*Try that card in another system
--*If you can't do either of those, a different power supply
*Bake it
 
Do you mean like blown caps? Otherwise, I don't understand what you mean.

I assumed that since it works once it is warmed up that caps wouldn't be the culprit since it wouldn't care about temperatures.
 
I was thinking more about the amount of time that it's been on rather than temperature. Faulty/malfunctioning caps may require more time to reach a full charge. I was thinking in the voltage regulation area....if a cap can't reach a full charge as quickly as it should, any caps following it in series would be affected too. This would result in voltage flutter/fluctuation beyond what design specs permit.

I've seen a similar phenomenon with motherboards....it would take several reboot attempts before a system would boot/POST. Most of the time it would result in instability. Since artifacting is a symptom of instability, I figured it may be worth mentioning.
 
Well, I havent touched it for a while, ive kept moving it a side a little bit to get it to start up and now it's doing something really strange...

The video is coming in and cutting out, 2 seconds of video 2 seconds of monitor off, 2 seconds of video... over and over... even when in bios....

at this point i don't know what to do
 
I went in through teamviewer and the video is working fine, leading me to think that the on-off-on-off video behavior is caused by my monitor....
 
What kind of artifacts are you seeing? If you can record these in a screenshot, it is the video card for sure.
 
I found out the problem of the on-off issue, my monitor went bad... Is it possible for a bad video card to take out a monitor with it? I don't think so, and in that case then the two problems were completely unrelated.

I have a new monitor now, the 27" yamasaki catleap. And yes, the artifacts can be recorded in a screenshot.

The thing is, its a 4870, and it works fine as long as i do two things:

1- Wait for it to heat up

2- Push it "downwards" on the back end of it.


I'm scared of baking it and having it not work forcing me to buy a new card... :/
 
Can't RMA, RMA time has expired...

Buying a video card might not be good since my CPU might bottleneck my card, right? I mean I'm running on a Q6600 overclocked to 3.4, wouldn't this limit my graphics power with a really nice card?
 
That is a pretty old processor. Whether it will be a bottleneck depends on the game and the graphics settings you are running.
 
Its an old processor for sure but I used to run a Q6600 at 3.6 with a Radeon 6850 and it did a great job. The Q6600 is still better than what a lot of people out there are running once overclocked.

I also had a card that was a 4870 that did the same thing you are talking about. Of course that card was in a car accident..... still it had the same symptoms. My guess at the time was that the impact caused something in the card to break loose so I just replaced it.

I'd buy a good card now and then later if you want you can upgrade your MB/Ram/Processor to something more modern. If your happy with the new card in your old setup though then have a beer on thideras and enjoy. :D
 
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