Agreed, if you are going to bin them, you might as well put them in the oven.

If the HSF's are any good on them I would strip them off as well. It is always nice to have backups for when your fans wear out.

The oven trick might pop the electrolytic caps on the card. I had that happen with a FX 5600.

bestemor wrote:

The sellers replies that "Why are you not using a driver? Without the recommended driver installed it is possible to 'overclock' and thus damage the card!"

...which I do not understand, as there earlier were artifacts at first boot, with NO harddrive attached, hence no driver. And even so, winXP SP1 2D drivers from 2001 should not be able to do any sort of 'overclocking' on this GF4, OR... ??? Confused... 😕

He is trying to imply that you damaged the cards yourself (by overclocking) so he won't have to give your money back.

The cards are clearly defective - you got scammed. I have an Asus GF4 Ti 4600 with the same issue. After swapping tree of it's memory chips it now works fine (3rd one was damaged). Try to get your money back.

Me and the seller of the Sparkle reached an agreement, hence no more testing of that one, yay! 😁

One final strange tidbit though: I noticed very different behaviour on the Slot1 vs the s478...

The slot1 consistently shows NO(!) artifacts at POST level and up to winboot starts, then a block pattern emerges as windows start up, but then suddenly hangs when the final login into windows should start (black screen).

The s478 on the other hand, shows colorful artifacts already at POST, as per first pictures, and acutally boots all the way to desktop, shown in second picture (first page here).

Go figure... 😕

Oh well, not gonna use the card anyways so... case closed on that one. Now, if only the seller of the MSI card would reply...