Sorry for the delay and thank you very much to you all for the feedback! Busy days, but reporting back now.
Ok, no baking then...
Tests carried out:
- I replaced the (unmodified, original) thermal solution with Artic Cooling MX4, following "Vaudane" advice. Nothing changed...
- I tried what suggested by "Roy Batty", using "Voodoo Control" I downclocked the GPU core and RAM to its minimum allowed (that tool won´t let you modify Core and Ram separately) Didn´t notice any difference.
Still getting "artifacts" and patterns of image corruption:
- Lowered resolution, color depth and refresh rate (from 75hz to 60hz). Problem persists
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Some things to notice:
- I ran a Direct Draw (dxdiag) test and it finished correctly. But when I ran the Direct3D one it crashed.
- Half Life (OpenGL) executes and shows no corruption. When I tried to switch it to DirectX mode, it crashed.
- Most DOS games I tried (QuakeGL, DukeNukem3D, DoomII) execute with almost no curruption (although Epic Pinball does show some "broken pixels"). Nevertheless, tried Expendable and it starts loading but never starts playing. Dethcarz or POD won´t even start loading.
Diablo and Dune 2000 played perfectly with no image corruption.
Inspecting visually the card, I don´t see anything bad in the front side. In the rear, on the other hand, I did notice a small "scratch" that crosses some bus lines, doesn´t seem deep enough though. What´s your opinion?
I´m not sure if the scratch was there before when the card worked perfectly. Frankly, I don´t recall any move that may have caused it either.
Do you think it may have something to do. Could it be repaired?