I sent several emails to artic cooling, no reponse yet. It looks like
my card is dead. As for sham b if you don't have anything helpful to
add to this thread then don't post. grow up.
Okay.
My post was to a comment in the thread that diverged from your original
question. I was not answering to your original post. this is the nature of
threads and newgroups in general. You dont own a thread if you start it,
and they tend to meander by their own accord.
On to the issue in case...
I have installed two artic coolers, one to a 9500 pro, and one to a 9800
pro. both took me twenty minutes each and significantly increased the max
overclock capabilities of the cards in question. I therefore believe that
the cooler is a useful addition to an ATI card, although as with all
modifications, it carries some risk, as well as invalidating your guarantee
on the card. This is not something new.
My experience is as follows (with relevent comments to your situation)...
In the case of my 9500 pro, I saw that the core was below the shim, and took
appropriate precautions. In all honesty, I feel that your problem is that
you did not see this and probably fried your GPU. Once you have destroyed
the GPU, adding more paste would not help. It cannot be a power problem
caused by the bigger artic fan because as you say, your problem is
permanent - undervoltage problems would not destroy your GPU
In the case of the 9800 pro, I saw that it tended to crash after a few hours
of play at stock speeds (something that it doesnt seem to do now, even when
overclocked agressively). I bougt an artic to fix this but during
installation I also found that this issue may have been down to insufficient
and cheap paste on the GPU, something that may well be a feature of all
cards like mine (Sapphire 9800 pro, boxed in the 'lite' package). After
seeing this, I stopped my heat sink mod and took the precaution of ordering
better paste (Artic silver 5), and putting my heat sink installation on hold
until I was sure I could perform the job adequately (ie I waited for
delivery of the paste). Far be it for me to say that you may have rushed
you rmodification, but it is worth noting that heat is a major killer of
high performance video cards, and if there is any doubt, you should hold off
finishing the work, irrespective of whether this prevents you using your
video card for a short time. Do it 'right slowly' is better than do it
'right now'.
I understand that you are angry about losing your card in the process of
modification, but that is no cause to belittle others who have had a
different experience with the same modification. It is just another
relevent fact and I mean no harm by saying it, and certainly wouldnt ask you
about your age.
Hope that helps
S
