- Feb 25, 2012
- 4
- 0
- 10,510
Hello everyone. I have this old AGP card, Sapphire Ati Radeon 9600 XT, and it was making a lot of noise because of the old fan. So I went to a store and managed to buy a new cooler(heatsink + fan). As I had taken the card to the store I asked the vendor to unplug the old heatsink with the fan from it for me, the rest of the job(clean, apply new thermal grease, install new cooler) would be done at home. This board was bought around 2007 and I never changed anything on it. The first thing I saw after the vendor unpluged the cooler was the huge amount of thermal grease on the gpu die that ended up going all around the die but didn't touch any of the metal components(transistors?) around. The grease had a metallic appearance(maybe conductive?). The fact is after a day of work and being exhausted, I went to clean the old grease and ended up spreading some of it on the metal components near the die. But it should be taken into consideration the die is very small and the "transistors" are quite near. As I was cleaning with a dry q-tip because I didn't have isopropyl alcohol, and the q-tip head is too big, it was easy to spread the grease all over. Anyway, I tried to remove all the grease in this way but at the end there was still some residue. After this I bought isopropyl alcohol and cleaned thoroughly the whole thing again including the little transistors using q-tips. So I saw there was a little "crack"(nothing deep) at one corner of the die. Got the new cooler and installed it and then turned on the pc to see the screen full of artefacts(horizontal and vertical lines, blurs) as shown in the attached images. I bought a new different brand thermal grease and the same thing happens. Swaped the new cooler with the old one and again no results. I guess this board is really damaged. And from what I've read, thermal paste on the metal components around die normally doesn't make this. I'm very careful with everything I have, I bought every hardware and built this computer that is working stable for years, wich leads me to believe the store guy that removed the heatsink initially, made a lot of strength and cracked the die(although it's not a deep crack). Or did I use too much force on the q-tips cleaning the transistors? Someone have any idea of what could be done? Is there a place that fix such cards(I'm from Brazil)? Could a isopropyl alcohol full bath help? Thanks a lot! Images follows.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/813/dsc01205re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/11/dsc01206re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/dsc01210re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/171/dsc01212re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/6/dsc01217re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/813/dsc01205re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/11/dsc01206re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/dsc01210re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/171/dsc01212re.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/6/dsc01217re.jpg/
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