I used for years another Asus GF4 Ti4600 that now shows similar symptoms. The card was supposedly faulty when I purchased it on eBay, but I replaced heatsink and fan, underclocked both core and VRAM, and it worked almost flawlessly up until last year, when it ultimately died after I removed the heatsink to clean the dust. You should first check that the fan still works. If so, I can send you a modified BIOS for your card with lower clock settings. Then you can try to flash it before loading Windows, and see if this helps.

Another idea would be (if you're not into flashing graphics cards) to install an old version of powerstrip (the old versions aren't trial-ware) and underclock it from there. Just a suggestion 😉

Btw batracio, feel free to enlighten me how to flash a graphics card BIOS. I'll do some reading now hehe 😜

Underclocking it is probably not the best idea in light of the fact that he can return it and get a working one. I'd send it back for a refund.

The picture on the eBay listing isn't really clear, but it does look like the AGP connector is pretty dirty, and I also see three Sacon/GSC capacitors on it that are pretty likely to be bad.

However, bad video RAM can also cause that sort of corruption...

vga cards do that when they die... at some point the pc won't boot with it...
return it and get a refund

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll figure out what to do then contact the seller.

Last week I had to replace a damaged GeForce 7300 LE with a bad capacitor. It was very easy to spot, bulging at the top and leaking some electrolyte. Unfortunately the eBay picture isn't clear enough and I can't see anything unusual, but of course you should examine the card by yourself and look for bad capacitors or any other damage.

About the BIOS flashing, you can make a backup before trying an underclocked version, and if it doesn't help at all, restore the original BIOS and return the card. I don't think there should be any problem with this.

The following instructions are valid for Nvidia cards only. The most well known BIOS editor is NiBiTor, but I use the older Ray Adams X-BIOS editor because I only have pre-DX10 cards. You can install and run it under Windows, read the video BIOS from memory, change some settings and save it to a file. Then you must use nvFlash to update the BIOS with this file. Video BIOS shadow option should be disabled in motherboard BIOS. Boot into DOS real mode (not virtual 8086 mode, and of course not in DosBox!) and run the following commands:

nvflash.exe -b oldbios.rom (where oldbios.rom will be the original BIOS backup)

nvflash.exe -f newbios.rom (where newbios.rom is... well, you already know)

If your system is so unstable that you can't use X-BIOS on it, you will have to get the BIOS files from somewhere else. Fortunately I can provide modified BIOS files for an Asus GF4 Ti4600, as I wrote previously.

I had a couple of Radeon 9700s do the same thing and ya it came down to underclocking the RAM.

And yup the cards from then can have bad caps. I had an Abit 4600 with bad caps years ago. But they were obviously bulging. The card was still seemingly fully functional however.

You know, this reminds me of what those xbox 360 start doing when they are about to go E74 + 2 red light of death.
I fixed a couple of those with reflowing, it is caused by a cold solder joint under the GPU, in other words a bad contact. Im not saying your video card has the same thing but it could and it might as easily be, as previously mentioned, a dirty agp connector or a bad cap or i dont know what.

A redneck diagnostic technique i have used before to troubleshoot a cold solder/bad contact was giving little taps with a plastic glockenspiel stick on the pcb while the device is running and see if/where it is producing glitchy behaviour.

Good luck, 🤣.

I dont see any bulging caps but there is some kind of clear copper tinted fluid around both of those tall copper wound things that have 4.7 printed on the tops, I don't know what they are...

Shagittarius wrote:

I dont see any bulging caps but there is some kind of clear copper tinted fluid around both of those tall copper wound things on the board, I don't know what they are...

Sounds like leaking caps. That stuff is corrosive and will eat through the circuit board or lift the traces. Send it back.

Shagittarius wrote:

I dont see any bulging caps but there is some kind of clear copper tinted fluid around both of those tall copper wound things that have 4.7 printed on the tops, I don't know what they are...

Those are SMD inductors. They don't have any electrolyte. Could you please take a better picture and post it here?

Judging from the pic on Ebay I can't see any signs of bulging caps. I think it's more likely the RAM or perhaps GPU.
You could contact the seller and show him your pics of the artifacts. I'm not sure if sending it back is worth it as you paid just 7 bucks for it. Perhaps ask him for a refund including shipping costs? Have you given him feedback yet?

I sent him a message stating that the board is not usable and linked it to this discussion so that they could see everyones opinions. That was a couple days ago and I haven't heard anything back yet.

If they don't get back to me I suppose I will be forced to leave bad feedback as you say the return postage will cost just about what I paid for the card.

What I did was let the seller know in a not unpleasant way about the defect and tell him that in the case of a full refund (I also send him clear pics of the defect) I'd still give him good feedback. I received the full refund and I gave him good (and deserved because of excellent service) feedback 😉