- Sep 14, 2003
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Back in March I bought a Powercolor Theater 550 Pro TV tuner. The card installed okay and works, and operates okay in a real basic playback app like MPC, but in any program that actually uses the onboard chip for hardware encoding, like SageTV, BeyondTV, or really any PVR app, the card locks up after a few minutes to a half hour of use. If you touch the chip at this time it is SCORCHING hot, and my system temperature is fine, under 40 C. So obviously I would attribute this problem to the lack of a heatsink on the card.
However, because the card ships without a heatsink and is *supposed* to work okay without one (even though it doesn't), ATI refuses to replace the card under warranty due to this problem and instead tries to blame it on other things in my system, such as PCI settings, driver issues, etc. I'm tired of them trying to shift the blame to other things when the fact is the card is just getting too damn hot.
So at this point I feel I only have two options, throw this card away and waste the $90 I spent on it, or try to install my own heatsink, which I would have no idea how to do. Any help?
Thanks.
However, because the card ships without a heatsink and is *supposed* to work okay without one (even though it doesn't), ATI refuses to replace the card under warranty due to this problem and instead tries to blame it on other things in my system, such as PCI settings, driver issues, etc. I'm tired of them trying to shift the blame to other things when the fact is the card is just getting too damn hot.
So at this point I feel I only have two options, throw this card away and waste the $90 I spent on it, or try to install my own heatsink, which I would have no idea how to do. Any help?
Thanks.