when you know you shouldn’t
Mar 5th 2005Wallabynerd alert
Sometimes, there are things one does, knowing that it’s probably not a good idea to even try.
Jumping the Grand Canyon, Evil-Knievel-style… on a rusty tricycle.
Smearing peanut butter and honey on one’s body and lying down in the woods near a bear’s den.
Buying a used video card on eBay.
That’s the one I did this week, and I suspect it’ll end badly… not quite as badly as the other two, at least. “Tested, works good”, the item description said. Sold as-is, and the picture very clearly showed that the heatsink/fan unit had been peeled off… but okay, I can fix that. CPU coolers like that are pretty easy to replace, and not too hard to find. Maybe I won’t even need one, there are tools to underclock it so it runs cooler. And it’s a GeForce4 Ti 4400 — the card I drooled over when it first came out, at $260 — for under $50. So I bid, and win, and wait three days for it to arrive.
Sure enough, heat sink is gone… quick trip to the local major chain computer store fixes that. And the computer does boot with the card in, and Windows even manages to get itself to look halfway decent without the nVidia drivers. Except for the flickering. And the strange little colored lines and squares that dance around the screen after 10-15 minutes of running. So I check that the fan was running; it was. And I upgrade the drivers. And there’s still the artifacts all over the place, and now Windows spontaneously reboots after about 20 minutes. (Haven’t even tried with Linux yet, although apparently nVidia’s pretty easy to install these days.)
Still running too hot? but there’s no hot spot on the back of the card, and the heat sink itself is cool to the touch. I might try replacing the thermal glue and screwing it onto the card (came with just a patch of thermal adhesive on the base of the heat sink). But I’m starting to suspect that it’s the card itself…. sigh.
