[damitamit]

Hi,

I have seen someone selling a faulty Ati 9800SE AIW on another forum.

By faulty, they mean the picture has feint lines of dots down the screen.

This is what they say:
Quote:

Seems to mostly work ok (as in a picture comes out) but the picture has feint lines of dots down the screen. I was unable to fix this. It looks like an overheating issue, but despite much fiddling with the heatsink I couldnt remedy it, so possibly it's more serious. Anyroad, i have a new graphics card now, so this is for sale. At its prime it softmodded to a 9800PRO absolutely perfectly with no artifacts, and served me very well indeed. It has never been overclocked, but was watercooled for most of its active life. It was upon fitting the old heatsink again for the first time that the problem appeared. t has a built in TV card (obviously). I am unsure if the problems are fixable (although i had no luck), hence sold as seen. It's certainly fine as a testing card to check a system boots correctly or whatever, and could be much much more.

They are selling it quite cheap. £35.

Im not into the computer scene at the moment so don't know much about the ATIs. Do you guys reckon that with a big of heatsink fiddling (or a new heatsink) and some extra cooling, this card may work??

Im quite tempted to buy it and try, as its a prety good card for 35 quid!
What you guys reckon?

thanks
Amit

 

[AuroraProject]

I have a hard time believing it had water cooling, but was not overclocked. Why water cool unless you plan to go faster with it? Personally, I'd avoid it, the heatsink's been removed, the warranty is void, and it's got known issues.

 

[tennisets]

Quote:

Originally Posted by AuroraProject I have a hard time believing it had water cooling, but was not overclocked. Why water cool unless you plan to go faster with it? Personally, I'd avoid it, the heatsink's been removed, the warranty is void, and it's got known issues.

Ditto. There's no way this guy would go to the trouble to watercool his card and not overclock it. That's the whole point of watercooling in the first place. I say stay away, even for that money.

 

[gsferrari]

lines on the screen = screwed up core.

Stay away!!

 

[Imyourzero]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tennisets Ditto. There's no way this guy would go to the trouble to watercool his card and not overclock it. That's the whole point of watercooling in the first place. I say stay away, even for that money.

Weeeelll..not always. Some people opt for watercooling for noise reasons, but generally yeah it's used by overclockers.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gsferrari lines on the screen = screwed up core. Stay away!!

Not so. Can also be memory issues. If you unlock the extra 8 pipelines on an SE, and they're damaged, you can get similar results. But yes, it's very likely the card has been damaged somehow. I've seen what you get from overheating, having pushed my 9800 Pro/XT (Pro flashed to XT) well past what it liked on many an occasion. Before I got my case temps down, I recall having to prop a desk fan blowing over the RAM sinks to keep it from crashing

I could have just downclocked it, I suppose, but what's the fun in that?

 

[damitamit]

Thanks for the advice guys!

Looks like ill pass on this one then...

(would've been a big step up from my current GF3 Ti200)

 

[Stephonovich]

Yeah; pity 'bout that. The 9800 is a very good card, even with newer games. It runs HL2 fine at fairly high settings. D3 so-so, but then, D3 was optimized for nVidia.

That being said, I'm selling mine in a few weeks and upgrading... Amazingly enough, the 9800 Pro has kept almost 100% of it's value. At Best Buy my card (128MB version) is going for $260. Sitting right next to is an X600 for $190. Insane. But then, the X600 (and pretty much all of ATI's current line-up, IIRC) is PCI-E only. That likely has something to do with it.