Reply 20 of 50, by swaaye
wrote:IME the R300 cards had awful longevity (all of mine died years ago 😢), despite being decent performers when brand new. Some folks around here have speculated its because their coolers were usually the bare-minimum for what the chips actually needed (and indeed they're usually pretty flimsy looking). Personally I wouldn't go after another one that was designed to need fan cooling, because of that experience. I don't know if the cards you have may have been "victims" of a similar phenomenon or not.
I've had a few 9700s need underclocking to remain stable. Specifically there would be image artifacts and the RAM needed to be reduced in clock speed. I don't know what the cause of this would be. Could be the RAM had run too hot over the years, or the GPU memory controller, or perhaps even the PCB....
The cards that use paste instead of thermal wax also frequently have dried out paste. Definitely need to look for that. 9800 and 9600 typically use paste I think whereas 9700 and 9500 have wax TIM.