Fried My Card?

I have a Radeon 9600SE, and put an Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer Rev 3 on it. The card didn't have a power plug on it so I just had the silencer itself on it, with no fan running. It was running fine, and I started to overclock it with AtiTool. Everything ran fine, till this morning, when I was in the middle of playing Natural Selection and my monitor just shut off and went to stanby. I shut the computer down, and tried booting back up, and the fans spun, hardrive spun, everything was fine, except the monitor wouldn't turn on. So i went and got my old Nvidia card, pulled out the 9600, put the old card in and booted up and the monitor came on and ran fine. Pulled it out, put the 9600 back in and tried again, monitor wouldn't come on. I tried resetting the BIOS by removing the BIOS battery, and everything reset, but no luck. So......here's the million dollar question, did I fry my beloved graphics card?

uhh did you put some new thermal grease on it before you put the new heatsink on? if you didn't then slap your self. lol ummm did your card have a stock fan on it if not then you should have bought a fanless heatsink like a noiseless vga cooler

Odds are its probally fried, but it should of auto turned itself off unless the turn off thershold is extremely high. Next time check the temperature on the Nvidia chip, before you decided to do more over clocking. BTW, are you midnight from OCS West Arena cs server?

by not turning on the fan on a heatsink that comes withone means that it'll most likely die.... if it was a fanless heatpipe heatsink then it would probably live. But running one without a fan = death

You can't help but to chuckle a little bit about stories like this. The VGA silencer has an enshrouded heatsink, therefor the fan is required to be running to remove the heat from the heatsink. I would be willing to bet that someone who replaces a stock heatsink with an aftermarket one and thinks it doesn't need a fan and then overclocks it to boot more than likely had no idea it needed thermal grease either and most likely didnt check to see if the shim needed to be removed.

While I feel somewhat bad for this person for frying his vid card I feel compelled to say to people, "If you don't know EXACTLY what you are doing, either leave it alone or take it to someone that knows what they are doing." At the very least, post on a forum and ask questions about it before you attempt to mod your hardware, there are very educated people on these forums that could have easily saved this guy from frying his card.

Bottom line, you killed your card dude.

Well, just to save myself some humiliation yes I did put thermal grease on, I figured that the heatsink was large enough that it wouldn't need the fan right away, afterall, in my train of thought, the thing was like 3 times bigger than the stock heatsink, I figured it must be fine ;o Guess it's not.

Consider it a valuable lesson learned, I'm just sorry it's such a costly one for you.

It really doesn't matter how large the heatsink is, you MUST have a certain amount of air moving over it in order to carry the heat away. Even the fanless variety of the Zalman heatpipe coolers rely on the fact that the average computer case has SOME minimal amount of airflow through it and the heat can be carried away.

With the VGA silencer and it's shrouded fan design, using ti without the fan powered would quite literally cook your GPU, and it sounds like that's exactly what you did.

Sorry bro...