f*&kin' refurbished crap

[tommyj27]

hi all,

i'm curious is overheating is a common problem with radeon 8500s? i've got the original 8500 64mb board and about 2 months ago i RMA'd it because it would lock up my system whenever i'd play games. got it back and the replacement card worked fine until today, maybe it got jealous that i've been hitting the PS2 pretty hard lately but now as soon as it warms up I get ever increasing screen corruption to the point where my display becomes unusable. tried playing some q3 and the corruption would increase for a while then clear briefly. maybe i just need to specify a working replacement card this time

specs:
athlon-xp 1600
256mb ddr
ati radeon 8500
slackware 9.0 -- 2.4.21-rc2-ac3
using the 20030407 dri snapshot with X4.3.0

[tommyj27]

oh yeah, to give you an idea of the corruption, the lavender portion of my wallpaper should be plain lavender w/o any of those nifty pinstripes, this is a shot i took before the display became too unusable to read menus

[MuFu]

There are some weird 8500 compatibility problems with certains mobos (most notably older Epox and Gigabyte DDR Socket A) where the card would lock up when playing games, or when it got even remotely hot.

Downclocking would solve the problem in almost all instances. It's far from an ideal solution but will at least determine whether this is the problem you have - try grabbing Rage3D Tweak, Powerstrip or something similar and lowering the clockspeeds of your card by about 50MHz.

MuFu.

[tommyj27]

i think it's already underclocked, i think it's set at 250/250, which was the setting for the 8500LE if i remember correctly, mine is supposed to run at 275/275. i'm looking for a way to force clock settings but i don't think powerstrip or rage3d will have a clue what to do with linux.
the overheating problem i had with the first card started way back last summer when i was still using windows for gaming.

[Burnt Powder]

Originally posted by tommyj27
i've got the original 8500 64mb board and about 2 months ago i RMA'd it because it would lock up my system whenever i'd play games........

Should have new something was up there and swapped it for a Nvidia based card right then and there (Chuckle Chuckle)