GFX card disaster!

[vega]

Fed up with not being able to overclock my radeon 9500 to any reasonable degree (using the rivatuners o/c sliders) , I decided to purchase a more powerful fan unit to facilitate more successful o/c'ing so purchased the Iceberq 4 unit from the overclocking store.
However, on installation, I found that the card started to exhibiting artifacting in all aspects of operation - games exhibited tearing to an alarming degree and normal 2d operations was replete with all sorts of weird pixel badness!
I replaced it with its origional fan but the problems remained - it is not a case of the cards cpu overheating as none of the symptons related to this are present, and I can see no visible damage to the card itself so my question to you good people is twofold - as taking the fan off invalidated the cards warranty, I'm aware that the cost of repair is down to me but does anyone actually repair cards? I ask because a friend says that it makes more sense to give up on it and purchase a new card as repairs for card based products are non existant.
Second point is this - I LOVE my 9500 big time and if it turns out to be beyond repair, I'll have to bite the bullet and purchase a new radeon - ideally, I'd love to pick up a 9800 but lack of wonga prevents this so whats my best bet - go for a 9600 or wait for 9800/9700 prices to fall?

 

[DaveSylvia]

While not the most ethical method, if you put the original fan back on I'm pretty sure the manufacturer of your card would not know the difference. As long as the card looks untampered with, most manufacturers will allow it to be RMA'd without a problem. Try getting it RMA'd I'm fairly certain they'll do that for you.

 

[Tarkus]

The cost of repairing a card is, especially for R9500 and equivalent cards, greater than the cost to replace the card so you won't find anyone to repair it. Consider it disposable technology.

Did you put heatsink compound between the HSF and chip when you installed the new unit? Is the HSF mating properly to the GPU core? IT sounds like the core isn't getting proper cooling... or worse, when you pried off the old HSF you damaged a solder contact or trace.