Ati AiW Artefacts (HW Problem)

[Ahri]

My ATi Radeon AiW 9800SE (without the extra pipelines enabled) has in the past 2 days begun artefacting. I first noticed this while booting my computer on the Grub bootloader and assumed I'd corrupted the file I'm using as a background for it. However when I booted Windows to play AoE3 I noticed more problems, and tried loading up Quake2 for confirmation - the artefacting seems to affect any 3D game (and the bootloader for some mystifying reason) - but not my desktop under either Linux or Windows.

I opened up my computer to check out whether the fan was jammed or something but it's working fine, so I cleaned it out a bit and hoped for the best - but it's still screwed. Nothing else seemed amiss, and I've not touched my computer's insides for a while or updated any drivers in the past couple of weeks. Besides, it seems more like a hardware problem if even the bootloader is affected

I've taken screenshots for your perusal:

AoE3: http://ahri.net/artefacting/screen1.jpg
Q2(1): http://ahri.net/artefacting/quake00.jpg
Q2(2): http://ahri.net/artefacting/quake01.jpg

Can anyone help diagnose the problem?

[Curly]

I would say the card is overheating, happend to an 9800xt I had when the fans died.... seeing as you said the fan is running ok.... is it on variable speed and not running full speed, other than that it could be the ram on the card failing/overheating.

Curly

[Ahri]

I tried taking out the card again and checking it over, and am currently downloading the CCC in the hopes of changing the clock rate. I've never played with any of the options on the card except when I first got it over a year ago (when I tried activating the extra pipelines, and it turned out they were defective). Is there any software I can download to check the RAM for errors?

[Ahri]

Update: having reinstalled the ATi drivers Windows took a _long_ time to figure out what res to set my desktop to, in the end it did settle for 32 Bit 1280x1024@85Hz but when I tried running AoE3 to test it complained that I have no video RAM whatsoever (0MB).

I Ran firefox to look at some stuff online and scrolling ran horribly, so Windows is definately under the impression that I have no video RAM.

Interestingly Linux is still operating under the impression that I do have VRAM and is all still working nicely - so I think I won't be updating the ATi drivers in Linux anytime soon.

So assuming the memory is screwed, what are my options? Where on the board is the RAM located? Is it realistic to think this could be fixed with a soldering iron? I'll get some AS to try cooling things down more too.

[Curly]

it don't look too good, unless the card is still in warrenty and you can rma it, it's new card time, the ram on the gfx card is soldered directly to the pcb so there's not much you can do there. I don't really know what else to sugguest........try uninstalling and re-installing the driver again?

Curly

[Ahri]

Thanks I suggested soldering in the ATi forum here and was laughed at so perhaps that's not a viable solution. It's definately not a driver problem as it affects both Windows and Linux, and even affects the bootloader which is completely seperate from Windows or Linux.