Garbled BIOS text output after heat damage
In case you wondered what the display from a heat damaged video card looks like, I have nice specimen available in the photo gallery. This Radeon 9800 Pro is not quite fried but overheating definitely rendered it unusable for all practical purposes. In-game artefacts and cursor artefacts are common symptoms of heat damage, but I had never seen text-mode corruption with garbled text at boot-time. As far as I have understood, such damage is irremediable.
The Radeon 9800 Pro is an excellent deal for those wish to extend the gaming life of an AGP based system on the cheap, but much care must be taken in dealing with the ungodly amounts of heat this thing radiates. Even more than usual, stay away from models mounted with cheap fans and tiny radiators or it will only be a matter of time before your Radeon 9800 Pro croaks horribly.
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[…] Re: Can’t start Windows after installing new motherboard!!! Ratmuffin wrote: > Nup – no screws loose there!! Ah well, I’ll get it taken into for some > proffesonals to have a look at. You could be right, the mothrboard > culd quite possibly be dogy, especially by the way its behaving Alternatively, it could be a broken video card. Check this out… http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/ind…er-heat-damage […]