- Joined
- Mar 11, 2001
- Location
- GR, MI
Well after over a year of perfectly flawless performance, my Sapphire 9500 has begun to fail! At first it started as a driver glitch with screen corruption followed by a system crash. I thought it was a bad driver or SP2 causing trouble, but it turns out the card itself is apparently toast.
I tested all sorts of drivers and different configurations but the artifacting, and crashing is just getting worse and worse! So I decided to finally pry off the gpu shim, and hardmod the extra piplines since it seemed I had nothing to lose.
Well, the card successfully hard modded and I thought maybe I had gained a second wind, but instead I found the card still crapped but, but without causing windows to lock up like it did with the softmod driver.
I assumed perhaps the 4 extra pipelines (orginally assumed defective) might have finally deteriorated beyond a usable level. Unfortuantely when I flashed the card back to a 9500 np it still crashed! AAAAACK! Apparently its worthless now!
It did give over a year of faithful service with a heavy overclock; 390 on the GPU and 300 on the memory (watercooled).
I just thought I would pass on the grim news that such a great card failed prematurely....I sure did like almost 20k in 3dmark2001se and 6k in 03! My MSI 9800 Pro arrives tomorrow...
I tested all sorts of drivers and different configurations but the artifacting, and crashing is just getting worse and worse! So I decided to finally pry off the gpu shim, and hardmod the extra piplines since it seemed I had nothing to lose.
Well, the card successfully hard modded and I thought maybe I had gained a second wind, but instead I found the card still crapped but, but without causing windows to lock up like it did with the softmod driver.
I assumed perhaps the 4 extra pipelines (orginally assumed defective) might have finally deteriorated beyond a usable level. Unfortuantely when I flashed the card back to a 9500 np it still crashed! AAAAACK! Apparently its worthless now!
It did give over a year of faithful service with a heavy overclock; 390 on the GPU and 300 on the memory (watercooled).
I just thought I would pass on the grim news that such a great card failed prematurely....I sure did like almost 20k in 3dmark2001se and 6k in 03! My MSI 9800 Pro arrives tomorrow...