Testing a video card *updated*

[Stuka87]

With no heat sink at all, the chip will over heat pretty much instantly. Even at startup.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

With no heat sink at all, the chip will over heat pretty much instantly. Even at startup.

It was on but pretty loose, maybe the fans would shake it around and make it so sometimes it had enough contact.
Still strange that sometimes it would work for hours and other times not at all.

 

[mikeymikec]

With no heat sink at all, the chip will over heat pretty much instantly. Even at startup.

Heh - anyone remember the videos showing what happened to Athlon XP's without a heatsink?

However, I would have thought that the minimum power consumption tendencies of many modern GPUs would make them significantly less likely to overheat during startup. I don't know whether the 280X has those sorts of capabilities though, and also who says that resuming from S3 or the initial boot stages is easy-going on a GPU. Considering how many CPUs act (or used to, unsure) during the BIOS stage (ie. high power usage), perhaps GPUs do similar things.

The GeForce 6200 in my mum's desktop was a ah heck to nail down as the cause of stability issues. Again it was intermittent, and never under load. It would just decide, seemingly randomly, to start acting flaky. I tested everything else I could think of before swapping out the card.