did i mess up my core??

[abracadabra1]

hey there fellas.
i used a knife to prop off the plastic black heatsink that comes w/ the radeon le so that i could pop on a nice copper hsf combo. anyways...on my first attempt w/ the knife i sort of scraped the core (actually scraped the bottom end of the gpu it's a very small dent, looks like the manufacturing of the gpu wasn't smooth, but nothing major). i then slipped my knife to the side of the gpu and popped off the heatsink w/ ease.

i proceeded to sand down the gpu and the copper hsf combo so that the surfaces would be as smooth as possible. i applied some arctic silver thermal advesive (epoxy) on the core, spread it smooth and mounted the copper hsf. i pushed down on the copper hsf for about 30 seconds and then put 3 large books on top of it for another 5 minutes so that the adhesive could dry off and there would be a nice solid fit between the core, adhesive, and the copper hsf combo.

i popped the radeon in my system and booted up. everything was fine until the boot operation gets to the part where windows is started (the part where the monitor flickers and starts the OS) and the monitor is just blank (tried in both me and 2k and had the same results). i tried loading fail safe defaults in bios and get the same results. i can, however, boot into safe mode w/ both OSs. any idea of what went wrong, or what i can do to fix the problem?

did i injure my gpu??

thx

 

[jehh]

Yuck, that isn't fun at all, but the fact that you can boot into safe mode should tell you something.

Have you tried replacing the original heatsink? No, it shouldn't matter, but this is computerland, where not all is as it seems.

Does another video card work fine in those systems?

Jason

 

[Merc7]

That sounds bad man. I'm not sure if you damaged the core, but you might have. I've heard some bad stories about sanding the core. I've modded two radeons so far with blue orb's and arctic silver epoxy (and LE and a retail 64meg). I didn't sand the core because I was afraid of damaging it. I just added a little more epoxy in the middle to compensate for the concave in the GPU. It probably doesn't have that great of heat transfer as compared to sanding it, but the radeon runs cool anyway. I always put a credit card in between the HS and the board before pulling the stock HS to avoid any metal coming in contact with he GPU. A few weeks back there was a thread where some guy put ramsinks and a blue orb on his radeon with AS epoxy and said it stopped working right. He pulled the ramsinks off somehow (AS epoxy is strong) and found that he got a little epoxy on some of the connectors. he wiped it off with nail polish and put the sinks back on and got it to work again I think. I'm not suggesting that you pull off your copper HSF as that might damage it more, but you might have gotten some epoxy on something important making it malfunction. Good luck to ya.

 

[abracadabra1]

welp...tried reinstalling drivers and no luck. no surprise there really.

popped off the copper hsf combo and lapped my mx and epoxied it on the mx. the mx is working just fine, don't really notice anything wrong with the radeon. oh well

i guess i'll keep her and try to fix it later when i have time