Radeon 9800 Pro Problems - please read

[ziralith]

Hi guys,

Im running a dell sc400 2.8 gigs/ 1.5 gigs of ram with the radeon 9800 256 pro.

I am an avid gamer and since I bought the card a few months ago, there has been no problems. However, recently, after a period of having the power on - especially playing games such as unreal/world of warcraft.. little dots start appears/blurring on the screen... they arent so bad that I can't play, however, I can tell the display is flickering back and forth a tiny bit (about 0.5mm jumps).. I have opened up the case while its running but it has not helped. I have uploaded the newest catalyst driver as well.. still a no go. After a while, I see these 3-4 mm squares on the game screen with little dots in them as well.. and the dots/flicker only happens during the games.. not in regular windows display.

I have played around with troubleshoting option in which I decelerated the graphics card a bit, however, when I try world of warcraft/unreal 2004 - the cursor just flickers really badly. I tried playing around with every setting on the display options (ati control panel) to no avail..

I just wrote an email to ati 2 days ago but they still have not returned my email.. any ideas what is wrong? Or what I can do to make this better?

The computer is shared by me and my gf so it has been played on sometimes for 12 hrs at a time .. but then, shouldnt it be ok for the graphics card?

Thanks in advance for all your thoughtful input - anything would help!

 

[Aliengeek]

Your situation could be 3 possibilities.

#1 Does your Dell have a powerful enough Power Supply to handle adding a 9800 Pro in the first place, [Look on the P/S for a wattage label] most Dell packages come with just enough wattage to cover whats in the system, Why? Because you usually end up going back to them for any upgrades, and you do have the P/S plugged straight into the video card Right?

#2 The ATI 9800 Pro runs hot it needs good case airflow, in the Dell case is it getting good airflow? How many cooling fans are in the case? Are there any places additional fans could be added? You should never have to open your case, you loose the airflow design when you do.

#3 And more than likely your problem is the sorry GPU cooling solution that comes on the 9800 Pro, I changed mine to a Vantec Iceburg 5, and used Artic Silver 5 on the GPU die itself.