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I ignorantly used surgical spirit to clean up the grease from my powercolor 4870, which caused it not work. If I were to clean it up using rubbing (Isopropyl) alcohol, can I ressurect it or is it completely dead,
I could try the theory but don't want to spend money on supplies that I'm rarely going to use.
Surgical spirit is usually a mix of ethyl (what you find in beer!) and methyl (methylated spirits) alcohols. As such it isn't a particularly aggressive solvent, and is as good as isopropyl alcohol for cleaning off thermal paste. So if you cleaned off all the old stuff with surgical sprit (and you didn't dissolve any of the plastic bits) then following up with IPA is unlikely to help.
In what way does it 'not work'? Is there any sign of life from it at all? Did you re-apply thermal compund before replacing the cooler? Is there any obvious physical damage to the board?
No visible physical damage on board, I applied artic silver, replaced stock cooler with akasa neo vortex cooler, plug it all in, turned it on, no signal on tft and crt monitor. Apart from using surgical spirit & don't know if it might have be static.
You have to be r3eally careless to cause static damage (although it is possible) but I think I'd try reseating the cooler (doees the fan spin on the new cooler) and then replace it, checking all the connections - is the board correctly seated in the slot, are any auxiliary power connectors seated correctly? (It is probably worth checking that before reseating the cooler anyway)
Cooler works, light is on & fan is spinning, but no display signal.
Surgical spirit can contain water so TBH you have to make sure that the particular formulation you use does not contain water.
The surgical spirit I used (from boots) only contained Etyanol and Methanol. I've tried testing the 4870, but no joy & have come to the conclusion that it's completely dead. Not a big deal, just wanted to give one last go at fixing it before I discard the card. Thanks for the help anyway.
you're just giving up like that?
try giving it a shake first :D
worked for me*
*I am not liable for any damage that may occur :rolleyes:
Are you sure it's not a RAM problem? Quite often when system RAM fails you won't even get the POST screen. Try one stick at a time and swap them around until you (hopefully) get something on the screen.
RAM's fine, I tried a gigabyte 4870 & that works fine on the same system, just the powercolor that doesn't.
RMA time?
Purchased the powercolor 4870 over a year ago, got annoyed by the loud stock fan & decided to replace it with the akasa vortex, but I must've messed up somewhere.
Try cleaning off all the Artic silver, carefully, make sure it fully clean (the gpu the area around it and the rest of the board) and there's no damage to the gpu it's self (it's possible to chip or crack an esposed chip like this one with miss handling esp when fitting the cooler)
Try refitting the cooler again, make sure you don't use to much AS as while it's not conductive it is compasative and can cause shorts and worse if it's on exposed soilder points.
Remove the Card and resit it, Remove Ram modules (ALL) and resit them - Ensure all power connections are right. I got the same thing randomly after turning of my computer - doing that and it worked
Forgot to state remove the battery to reset the bios, I did that too.
Check the removed cooler, make sure nothing is still attached, ive seen many memory chips come off from removing ram heatsinks, and gpu coolers.