First post, by Namrok
So I'm playing Doom 3 last night on an Athlon 64/Geforce 6800 GT rig I built in Dec. I've made it all the way up to Delta Labs 3, and extremely suddenly while I'm listening to a PDA log, the display corrupts with a patterned distortion, and then the computer hard locks. I restart, and things look like this.
It's the first moderately warm evening we've had around here, and it was pretty stuffy in my office. I'm assuming this is heat related. And yet when I am able to boot into windows, the temperature monitor on the graphics card doesn't look out of place at all. About 40 degrees C. To be on the safe side I redid the thermal compound on the actual geforce chip. I didn't have spare thermal pads for the ram chips, so I left those as is. It seems to help some, but the distortion is still there when I restart and rapidly escalates. This morning WinXP couldn't boot at all.
I'm assuming whatever damage done is done at this point, and I should be in the market for a replacement. I'm unclear if anything overheated in the strictest sense, or if the substandard solder I'd read about finally gave up the ghost under even moderate stress. I'm going to borrow a Geforce 4 from my work's supply closet (I don't know why we have it either), just to make sure a different graphics card will work. I mean, I'm pretty sure, but you never know. Aside from that, any advice on a hail mary attempt at fixing this card?
Full Specs for those that believe them relevant:
ASUS K8V Deluxe
Athlon 64 3200+
1.5 GB DDR400
BFG Geforce 6800 GT OC
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Old IBM 120 GB rust platter
EVGA 80+ 500W PSU
Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS
