Please provide:
- Pictures of the card if possible
- Pictures of the artifacts in different stages

See Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro repair report and try running R3MEMID. Also see VGA Repair report collection - there is a bunch of R300 based card repairs in there. Check if one of the error screenshots matches your error pattern.

I am yet to see a Radeon 9700 with bad caps.

How long has it been since these were in service?

Could be bad caps, do you see any buldging?

But it also sounds like a possible bad bus connection... if card or system was unused for lengthy, there could be fine surface corrosion, I'd give the card and socket a good cleaning, and probably unseat/reseat the card a few times... just to help clean the connections.

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-05-07, 16:21:

How long has it been since these were in service?

The motherboard has been used recently with various GPUs. This particular 9700 non-pro was purchased with blind faith weeks/months ago, and only lightly tested with no artefacts spotted until after today's hard crash. I dusted the whole card with air from a manual air pump, and wiped the gold fingers using a light brush and isopropyl alcohol. Looking at the heatsink nylon plugs, I think condition reflects the original factory fitting. In my experience, a very loud fan is followed by a serious failure - in hindsight it feels like noise reflects compromised cooling, which is followed by component overheating. Next time I hear a fan I'll yank the main plug out!

I'll begin with the least invasive photos. I don't see obvious bulging, but these are metal cans that typically vent more than bulge?

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-05-07, 16:15:

Please provide:
- Pictures of the card if possible
- Pictures of the artifacts in different stages

Again, starting with the least invasive photos (least amount of GPU heating) - turquoise in white characters during POST. It's similar in BIOS setup where it's clear this particular corruption is repeating across specific characters rather than screen coordinates. In this photo all the "I" characters have a corruption. But, it's a different corruption in AMIBIOS vs PCI and the "s" in "ss" is inconsistently impacted.

I don't see the same artefacts in the repair case studies, and I felt slightly unwell on seeing the post about heat damaging the ASIC! 🙁

I'm going to replace the heat transfer compound before running R3MEMID because my gut is telling me this all stems from a sudden overheating. I'm kicking myself.

Seems to be a dead memory. Probably it was already on its way and PCB warping from reseating the card has put the final nail in the coffin.

Yep, I agree. Nothing to be too worried about. You're not making it worse by testing further. Give R3MEMID a shot.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Yesterday, 08:05:

Seems to be a dead memory. Probably it was already on its way and PCB warping from reseating the card has put the final nail in the coffin.

I think dead memory is likely, and I think the cause is unlikely to be PCB flex.

PBC flex feels very unlikely because I’ve handled thousands of cards in my career and I’ve not had a damaged one before - except the time I attached a wrong voltage and a VBIOS chip caught fire 😉

The chronology is - the 9700 was displaying no artefacts, fan had a problem, and it then suffered a hard crash. I should have turned off the PC as soon as the fan made an unhealthy noise.

An unhealthy noise is a defect that should not be ignored.

It's just as unlikely that the loud fan had to do with it. Don't look for causalities now, because you will not find them in a guaranteed manner.

If you wanna fix it, the threads show how to start. Happy to assist.

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 12:15:

It's just as unlikely that the loud fan had to do with it. ...

Agreed, fan's can be loud when for whatever reason (poor thermal paste etc) they are not cooling...

But ... stuff almost always stops working correctly due to heat quite some time before permanent damage occurs.

Its not like it failed while unattended and you didn't "notice" for a lengthy time. You were booting it cold and noticed failure right away, I highly doubt it would have even got to the failure point before you saw it, let alone the permanent damage point.

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 12:15:

If you wanna fix it, the threads show how to start. Happy to assist.

Thank you!

I do want to fix it and need to push the fix to next month.

Right now I’m in hospital, and when I get home will not be allowed to lift my PC cases for two weeks. I also need to buy a heat gun to work with BGA chips.

DaveDDS wrote on Yesterday, 16:28:

Agreed, fan's can be loud when for whatever reason (poor thermal paste etc) they are not cooling... […]
Show full quote

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 12:15:

It's just as unlikely that the loud fan had to do with it. ...

Agreed, fan's can be loud when for whatever reason (poor thermal paste etc) they are not cooling...

But ... stuff almost always stops working correctly due to heat quite some time before permanent damage occurs.

Its not like it failed while unattended and you didn't "notice" for a lengthy time. You were booting it cold and noticed failure right away, I highly doubt it would have even got to the failure point before you saw it, let alone the permanent damage point.

I get what you are saying and I have a counter argument.

I only recently came back to old hardware, and what I think I’m seeing is the exact same familiar stuff but often with +20 years of hardened grime in difficult to reach spaces. The age of the grime changes the physics and the rules.

The physics changed because a flake of dried out grime can lift off and rattle the fan, reducing speed like a bicycle brake. In fact, the noise I’m referring to is not unlike a playing card in a child’s bicycle spokes.

I’ve experienced two failures in as many weeks, both involved loud fans. The other one was a PC tower that I bought, checked inside to see it was clean/complete, and then turned it on. I heard a very loud PSU fan. I saw the BIOS, noted the CPU and RAM, and then bang! Smoke from the PSU..

It’s all anecdotal, but I feel that in both examples the hardware would be in better health today if I had disassembled the cooling and made it all run smooth and efficient before powering up.

The Radeon 9700 fan now spins practically silent. 20 years ago I’d have tuned routinely so things didn’t get as grimy to start with..

Before coming into hospital I did clean one noisy 9600 XT fan assembly and it was atrocious because the amount of old dried grime removed using a cocktail stick was almost as big as the fan itself!

MattRocks wrote on Today, 05:47:

Thank you! […]
Show full quote

tehsiggi wrote on Yesterday, 12:15:

If you wanna fix it, the threads show how to start. Happy to assist.

Thank you!

I do want to fix it and need to push the fix to next month.

Right now I’m in hospital, and when I get home will not be allowed to lift my PC cases for two weeks. I also need to buy a heat gun to work with BGA chips.

No pressure, recover and get well again. Once you're making progress on the repair, feel free to share. I'll be watching the topic for updates.

MattRocks wrote on Today, 06:04:

I get what you are saying and I have a counter argument. ...

Fair enough, fans can get quite dirty to the point where it impeeds operation (which is why when testing equipment with fans, before power: I always give the fan a spin with my finger and see how smooth it is and how fast it slows down)

But ... over the years, In testing, there have been several times when I brought up "high heat" (ie: should have cooling fans) briefly without bothering to install the fan, just to see if they worked.

Without a cooler (ie: bare chip), these can get hot very fast, but still work enough to see POST etc. .. with a cooler and no fan attached, it takes a much longer time, lots long for an OS to boot.

In your case, fan was "noisy" which means it was attached and moving some air, so although it might still allow heat failure, that would have occurred well past boot.

Even in cases of "degrading thermal compound", it will still do some cooling, which will reduce operational time, but I've never seen so much so that it wouldn't even boot.

The "big test" to see if this might actually have been caused by the fan is - feel the cooler!
If it gets so hot that it's uncomfortable to touch quickly, your problem isn't airflow.
If it takes minutes to get warm, everything is good.
(I realize that you've already cleaned the fan - but unpowering it would be equivalent to it still being "grimy" (slightly worse))

In cases where you suspect bad heat conduction between device and cooler, power-off and feel the underside of the board just
below the chip (socket/pins will conduct head to the board)

These are the reasons I keep a fine temp probe... so I can accurately measure temps of components with small access (like edges of covered chips in this case)