Lots of problems after replacing thermal grease on Radeon 4870

mister g

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Mar 6, 2010
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Hey everybody and thanks for your time. First off about two weeks ago I got really annoyed with the thermals on my Asus Radeon 4870 hitting 60C after playing a few games (i noticed the fan kicking up a notch above normal) and I thought why don't I do something about it and replace the thermal grease. The heatsink of this card comes off after removing 4 screws and I had to pull a little because the grease had hardened and was kind of stuck on. After replacing that stuff with some AS5 I started it up and SmartDoctor told me that the temps never went up above 58C which I thought was high but reasonable given the summer heat. However a lot of problems cropped up that I was able to ignore until now.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=63&post=23336&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

However just now I was playing Bioshock and I know this GPU could push out close to 60 fps with everything on high quality before, now it could barely do 14fps. The question today is 1. Did I screw up the thermal paste job and the card is permanently damaged?. Or is it 2. The eBay guy who sold it to me told me he had overclocked it a bit, and that even though it was working fine six months ago is it now failing on me?

Update: installed Catalyst 11.7, none of the problems went away.
 

mister g

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I also played some Left for Dead 2 and my average frame rate with everything on high (including AA) is only 30fps. Going to try and reformat and see if anything improves.

Update: Never mind the problem's fixed. I must have push it into the PCI-E port the wrong way or something. After I took it out and put it back in all the problems mysteriously dissapeared.