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[guzzidom]

I uninstalled ATITools as I was always a little concerned that it wouldn't even clock my card to (default!) 310mhz without artefacting and installed Rivatuner, I put the clock settings to the 345/306 my card has always been happy with and POP!, no picture and a room full of burning plastic smells!.

I'm going to try and RMA it (I've had it 3 months and had a few issues with it on purchase that I was in E-Mail discussion with the supplier over) but right now I'm typing this with a geforce2 mx200 installed, even the picture quality is crappy, Just ran 3dmark 01 and my score has dropped from 18k to 1.4K

Boo!

[InvaderTrax]

I miss my 9700 Pro. I put my VGA Silencer on too tight and it cracked the core. RMA'd it back to Powercolor and they sent me a 9800 Pro EZ, which was somewhat under par of the 9700 Pro.

[oralpain]

RivaTuner didn't kill it. YOU killed it, or it was already defective.

 

If ATITool showed artifacts, the card was definatly unstable. So, you clocked it higher? Big surprise that it died...

[guzzidom]

Read my post Oral, I clocked it at exactly the same clock settings that showed no artefacting in ATITool, and indeed the card had been sitting at those settings for months, though the card was, as you say always a bit suspicious, it came memory clocked at 550 instead of the proper 620mhz and any attempt to get back up to 620 caused artefacting, though it was ok at up to 618, therefore, theoretically ALL I actually changed was the program I used to acheive the same clock settings. Hence my thread title.

Mind you if I'd left the bloody thing well alone entirely and stuck with ATITool I'd still have the card so maybe I ought to change the thread title to "my changing the o/cing program killed my 9700 pro" , still I've sent it back (fingers crossed), 6600gt here I come!!

[swifty11212]

save up for the x800 xl in june. worth the money in the long run.

[tbone2sk]

Your card does not fry from using rivatuner. What were your temps, your heatsink might have been on right.

[the11ama]

It could have simply been bad chips... I had to return my first 6800GT because of some serious problems with the core. It's not a far bet that the card may have had a weak chip that finally gave out; chip manufacturing is not perfect.

[guzzidom]

Yeah the card always felt a bit unstable, nothing tangible really but too much variance in benchmarking, and everytime I changed drivers it was a struggle to get my monitor to refresh properly (the system would show 85mhz EVERYWHERE but the monitor would be at 65mhz), never really trusted it, Really my point was, Does Rivatuner approach the overclocking process differently to ATITool?, it seems strange that my card decided to pop the very second I installed it and clocked the card back to where it had been before, No temp sensor on my 9700pro tbone, case temps as low as 4 x 120mm fans will make it, nothing else o/clocked, my rails all tend towards the high side though, generally by about 0.45v (though very stable), and I cannot put up with this GF MX200 til june!!