Yet Another Dead Ati Card

indyjones

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Well that's wonderful, tried to watch Kill bill on bluray last night and was presented with a load of BSOD. I uninstalled the drivers to update as it had been a little unstable recently, only to find in restart i had screen artfacting everywhere even during post. So my sapphire ultimate hd2600xt appears to of cooked itself :(

Out of the 4 ati cards i have owned to 9800s, the 2600 and a 9200, only the 9200 has lasted :(
Yet my ORIGONAL geforce 1 card still works fine!
I am no nvidia fanboy and like cpus i will buy whatever makes to most sense at the time, but after this it will take alot for me to touch ati again. More so as it now means I have to head off to the hated pcworld to pick myself up a geforce 9600GT card, so the htpc is up and running again asap.

Rant over :D
 
Have any of those cards been ATi brand or just ATi chipset? Perhaps it's 3rd parties fault and not ATi so much.
 
sapphire == ati they make all the "built by" cards you can get in the US :)
 
That would make me not want them again either. A lot of it could be the air flow of your case. Size does make a difference in some of them.
 
cooling is fine, but it was a passive card...... Been running fine for over a year but its only recently had to deal with Bluray maybe that pushed it over the edge.

Currently got a PNY 9600GT but I think I will try and take it back as the bloody thing sounds like a jet engine. Also my rear speakers are not working so I am worried when the card overheated it killed my sound card :(
 
passive cards are not meant to do anything except run word :)

You want an actively coold card for anything other than general business use.
 
I have this cooler on my 8800GT, works great, card folds at around 60C and is nice and quiet...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118037&Tpk=zalman vf1000
It didnt come with enough RAM sinks for my card though, so be sure you got enough if you order any aftermarket cooler. And the screws for that thing are tiny, I broke one and had to do some rigging, didnt want to RMA over 1 broken screw.
 
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I read a few reviews about the factory OC XFX 9600GTs - they all said they were fantastic and really quiet. Not sure about the PNY ones though, they're usually the crap that PC World ends up with that no-one else wants :S
 
i just use the stock fan on the 7600gt i have in htpc for bluray and such
mind you the system is keep extremely cold, sits under a window most of the time :D
 
ATI are not impressing me at the moment, although their latest 9.1 drivers seem to be doing good things.

Been so tempted to chuck out the current ones and get something NVIDIAy.
 
Heat death seems to go in cycles. For a few years nvidia GPUs barley lasted a year before they died. So I switched back to ATI. Then ATI turned into toaster ovens and I went back to Nvidia. Last I checked ATI cards of equal speed were much hotter which means bigger, noiser fans or heat death.

As for passive cooled, no way on video unless it is very low end was my rule. But with the cards now doing video conversion on board, especially HiDef, even low end cards are going to need cooling too.

The second problem I've seen is brands. If the card is built poorly I have seen a lot of failures from heatsinks put on crooked or not properly glued or thermal compound not aplied evenly. Unfortunatley I've seen poorly built cards for many major brands (ATI Branded, Sapphire, ASUS, MSI), so there is no brand I can recommend.

All I can say is don't buy a card unless it has a hundred reviews and none of them mention poor quality, noise or heat issues.
 
Cheers for all comments :)
I am going to try and take that PNY card back tomorrow, for a start it advertises HDMI but has no connectors plus its just so bloody loud! Its either INNO3D or I downgrade and go for the XFX 9500GT. They are meant to be pretty slow but it should be comparible to the old HD2600XT plus run cooler, and have better video decoding abilities. As its a HTPC its never gonna run games so I guess that is not important? Has anybody heard anything about INNO3D btw?

Lastly the stupid graphics card may of cooked my daughter card for my sound card so I am now sorting an RMA out for that too. Its times like this I just wished I had got SKY HD !

Final rant of the day over :D
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Hmm, well as far as the HDMI goes, my card has a DVI to HDMI adaptor which does infact do hdmi with sound.
 
I have this cooler on my 8800GT, works great, card folds at around 60F and is nice and quiet...

60 degrees Fahrenheit would be impossible unless the room is cooler then that or you have direct A/C cooling into the case.

Maybe you meant 60 degrees Celsius?
 
see if you can pick up an 8800GT or equivalent or higher. Hardware acceleration of blu-ray and hddvd needs some brute force on your video card as well as in your cpu. You won't do it smoothly with anything less than an 8800GT (or equivalnet) and quadcore intel.
 
see if you can pick up an 8800GT or equivalent or higher. Hardware acceleration of blu-ray and hddvd needs some brute force on your video card as well as in your cpu. You won't do it smoothly with anything less than an 8800GT (or equivalnet) and quadcore intel.

Sorry Lord, but I strongly disagree with this. A quad core is massive over kill, a good dual core is fine. As for the GPU even a 9500GT has the same or better decoding abilities as the 8800GT as that is the point of hardware acceleration.

Apart from it cooking itself I had no problems with Bluray playback (no dropped frames etc).
 
Sorry to hear about your luck with ATI. I have two currently installed (4870 in one computer and 4850 X2 in the other)

I've never had an ATI or an Nvidia fail on me and have respect for both companies' manufacturing processes.
 
60 degrees Fahrenheit would be impossible unless the room is cooler then that or you have direct A/C cooling into the case.

Maybe you meant 60 degrees Celsius?
Yeah my typo, we're having a heat wave around here and I guess it went to my head! :D
 

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