Yes, that seems like a dying card to me. If it is a bad solder connection somewhere you can try a little ''reflow'' with a heatgun or in the oven. What do you have to loose?
Most times it will not cure forever but if you're lucky you can use it a little longer, sometimes months. Just keep it cool afterwards.

If it is a bad memory chip it is probably game over (very few people can replace these i guess). As a very LAST resort you can try something like an overvolting mod, maybe that kicks it back to life.

Tip for using 9700/9800 cards in the future: do not overclock them and cool them well. The cards that live the longest are cooled with good zalman coolers or the bigger alternatives like the ones from Artctic Cooling. A lot of the cards wit stock coolers are defective or gone. The same goes for every other highend card if you want to get the most use out of it.

Try underclocking the memory a little bit and see if that fixes it.

F2bnp wrote:

Try underclocking the memory a little bit and see if that fixes it.

Underclocked the memory and core to the minimum possible and it was still there.

Bought this boxed around a year ago and only checked it now since I didnt have any boards with a 1.5v AGP slot until recently. The big lesson here: dont buy anything you can't check.

Is it a PRO or an SE? You could unlock the pipelines in the SE to work as a PRO but this would bring up issues. This looks like similar behaviour.

Bancho wrote:

Is it a PRO or an SE? You could unlock the pipelines in the SE to work as a PRO but this would bring up issues. This looks like similar behaviour.

Its the pro

Munx wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Is it a PRO or an SE? You could unlock the pipelines in the SE to work as a PRO but this would bring up issues. This looks like similar behaviour.

Its the pro

P_20161230_193924.jpg

As an extra alternative, would it be possible to "downgrade" this PRO to disable some pipelines so it kinda works like an SE?
If there's nothing else left to do, might as well give this a try.

Tetrium wrote:

Munx wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Is it a PRO or an SE? You could unlock the pipelines in the SE to work as a PRO but this would bring up issues. This looks like similar behaviour.

Its the pro

P_20161230_193924.jpg

As an extra alternative, would it be possible to "downgrade" this PRO to disable some pipelines so it kinda works like an SE?
If there's nothing else left to do, might as well give this a try.

I'll give it try once I have more time, though I'd still be looking for a new card since the performance would be crippled too much for my liking.

You could also skip one or 2 generations and upgrade to the 2xxx or 3xxx series.
They use PCIe to AGP bridges but otherwise would run way cooler.

Munx wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Munx wrote:

Its the pro

P_20161230_193924.jpg

As an extra alternative, would it be possible to "downgrade" this PRO to disable some pipelines so it kinda works like an SE?
If there's nothing else left to do, might as well give this a try.

I'll give it try once I have more time, though I'd still be looking for a new card since the performance would be crippled too much for my liking.

Just to be clear, I've never actually done anything like this myself (or I did but I've forgotten about it 🤣), but it's actually quite common practice with hardware manufacturers themselves to castrate partially defective hardware (for instance by either disabling parts or by binning them lower) in order to still be able to sell them.

You're right about it loosing performance if you actually managed to do this "downgrade", but it's better then to end up with a spare part than it having nowhere left to go but the bin.

And it probably won't hurt to keep looking for suitable replacement parts anyway 😜

I don't know from top of my head how bad performance will suffer as I don't think I ever used any of those 2 graphics cards.

And feel free to keep us updated 😀

elod wrote:

You could also skip one or 2 generations and upgrade to the 2xxx or 3xxx series.
They use PCIe to AGP bridges but otherwise would run way cooler.

I'm looking into building an era-correct, early DX9 rig from 2003-2004, the kind you'd build for HL2, Doom 3, UT 2004, etc. Preferably ATI. So the card I'm looking for is like a 9800pro or x800.

Tetrium wrote:

I don't know from top of my head how bad performance will suffer as I don't think I ever used any of those 2 graphics cards.

Looks like I'd be in 9600XT territory, below 9700. I'm not too hopeful since after looking into this some more the checkerboard patterns and vertical lines in the artifacting are most likely due to memory, which I cant hope to fix.

Tetrium wrote:

Munx wrote:

Bancho wrote:

Is it a PRO or an SE? You could unlock the pipelines in the SE to work as a PRO but this would bring up issues. This looks like similar behaviour.

Its the pro

P_20161230_193924.jpg

As an extra alternative, would it be possible to "downgrade" this PRO to disable some pipelines so it kinda works like an SE?
If there's nothing else left to do, might as well give this a try.

yes it's worth giving it a go, I think you can do it on riva tuner, not with a 9800, but I once did this to a 8600 (disabled 16SPs, turning into a 8500GT) and it cleared some bad artifacts it had...

but, for what is worth, when I had artifacts with pipeline mods that were not perfect the artifacts looked different.

A small update: bought a 9800 XXL by Medion, which should arrive sometime within a week. Looking at the specs its equivalent to a 9800pro.

Has anyone had any experiences with these cards? How is the cooling compared to stock 9800pro? Also I assume it's powered by the floppy power cable?

I'm finding little info on this card online...

My only experience is with a Medion XL card (a less powerful graphics card compared to yours).

I didn't like the very tiny HSF of it hough, so I hope yours will be better.