Hi, I'm having a problem with my card at the moment and it's quite typical of the X1950 PRO. My card is overheating and crashing in stressful games such as Oblivion and Lord of the Rings online and the problem is becoming much more frequent. This is a image of the crash that occurs. As you can see, artefacts all over and the 3D parts are just completely corrupted. Things I've done:- I've completely cleaned my system, even taking the panel off the heat sink and blowing out any caked dust. And also I've changed the ventilation of the system so that heat is quickly extracted from around the graphics card itself. As you can see from my specs, my PSU is more than powerful enough to supply the card with power giving out 38amps across the 12v rail as well as 336W on the 12v rail also. When the game did crash however, I did notice the new fan that is extracting the air was very very warm. Just another piece of information, the card has never been overclocked either so the card couldn't have been damaged from doing such a thing. I'm concerned that this problem may have arisen from some power cuts that have occurred but other then that I'm stumped. Any suggestion guys? Cheers (Oh yeah, sorry for the long post)
These cards can't stand heat. I don't give a carp what people bragg about saying they don't have problems. I have to keep my card below 58C or 150 F degrees, and get all that hot air out of the case. if you have a hot computer room, you are screwed. Also, in the game you are playing you probably have to bump your video settings down, if the game gets artifacts and/or freezes. Good Luck.. :beam:
Sorry to hear your card is going bad. How long have you had it? 3 months seems to be a popular breaking point for these cards. I would RMA the card if I were you because the card should not be artifacting like that with the normal case airflow. You also shouldn't have to jump through hoops by installing a 500 megawatt air-conditioner just to make the thing work. However, if you can't RMA it, you may want to try a new cooling solution for the card. 2 good ones are the Zalman VF900-cu and Arctic Cooling's Accelero x2. Just a note on your PSU, you don't add the rails together to get your sustained/continuous power output on the +12v rail. You divide the wattage on the +12v by 12. So 336w divided by 12 = 28a sustained/continuous power on your combined +12v rails. No worries, this should be enough to power the Sapphire X1950 Pro. Good luck to you.....
If the card is screwed RMA it, then put an Accelero X2 http://arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=90 on your next card, it'll keep it nice and cool, right now mine's idling at 33c with a light OC, and it'll lower once the thermal paste sets in.
Yep i'm dealing with this heat issues myself, I have a Vantec dual fan card cooler in a PCI below it and took off the plastic cover over the heatsink since it seems to trap the air in and I wanted full bare heatsink for effective cooling, I will be looking into seperate cooling for the GPU, Ram and VRMS that the current heatsink covers together bad idea in my eyes.
