So the part you are looking into is part of the GPUs power delivery (VDDC). It's main actor is an SC1175, it's a dual rail switching regulator that uses both the 5V from the 4Pin connector and 3.3V from the AGP slot.
L1 (lower one) is for the 3.3V to VDDC converter part, L2 is for the 5VEXT to VDDC converter part.

Can you first check the resistance of VDDC against GND? (measure resistance from C81 or C82) - it should be around 12-24Ohms. Having them getting hot sounds awfully like a short somewhere.

Yup, they are all shorted. C80, C81, C82 have 0.4 Ohm resistance. Also the SMD electrolytic next to them as well C732

Uhh ohh.. not good. Well.. its probably not the caps that are shorted. Can you check with the thermal camera what else gets hot?
On VDDC there isn't much. Mainly the GPU and it's decoupling caps on the back.

If there is nothing standing out and you feel adventerous: remove the silver heatsink (either making it warm or very cold, your choice) and then the FETs below. If the short remains, it's pretty likely the GPU is shorted.

I compared the thermal profile with a working card that I have, and I saw that on the working card the most hot components on the back are the gpu core and the ram chips. On the bad card those are room temperature i guess.
Went ahead and took of the small heatsink and desoldered the 4 FETs underneath. Short on the caps is still present.

Retronerd878 wrote on 2026-04-26, 09:38:

I compared the thermal profile with a working card that I have, and I saw that on the working card the most hot components on the back are the gpu core and the ram chips. On the bad card those are room temperature i guess.
Went ahead and took of the small heatsink and desoldered the 4 FETs underneath. Short on the caps is still present.

Crap.. Unless one of the ceramics is shorted, this sounds like the GPU being dead.

Any idea which ceramics are on the VDDC line?

I marked them green for you:

CP1, CP2, CP3, CP4, C55, C56, C57, C58, C59, C673, C60, C61, C62, C63

Yeah I took them all off and no improvement. I'm guessing this one is dead.
Anyway, my other "working" Radeon 9800 Pro I just realized that it's not really working that well. It boots into windows xp no problem. No artifacts. If I try to install drivers, it freezes up. If I try to run 3dmark 2001 with windows xp drivers I get black screen.
What seems to be the problem?

Retronerd878 wrote on 2026-04-26, 11:16:

Yeah I took them all off and no improvement. I'm guessing this one is dead.
Anyway, my other "working" Radeon 9800 Pro I just realized that it's not really working that well. It boots into windows xp no problem. No artifacts. If I try to install drivers, it freezes up. If I try to run 3dmark 2001 with windows xp drivers I get black screen.
What seems to be the problem?

Check voltages and for good measure run R3MEMID. Not every memory controller fault result in immediate artifacting.

Where do i check for voltage?

Blue - VDDC - Around 1.66V
Pink - MVDDC - Around 2.9V
Green - VTT - Around 1.45V
Yellow - MVDDQ - Around 2.7V

Blue 1.68V
Pink 2.7V
Green 1.4V
Yellow 2.65V

R3MEMID passed all tests. I think i need to do a clean install of Windows XP as the drivers for geforce 4 were previously installed. Maybe it was a software issue.

Retronerd878 wrote on 2026-04-26, 16:42:

Blue 1.68V Pink 2.7V Green 1.4V Yellow 2.65V […]
Show full quote

Blue 1.68V
Pink 2.7V
Green 1.4V
Yellow 2.65V

R3MEMID passed all tests. I think i need to do a clean install of Windows XP as the drivers for geforce 4 were previously installed. Maybe it was a software issue.

Good news. Give it a shot.