X800XT Lives! But for how long?

Commiserations, were they both Asus?

Generally with ATI there seems little variation in board design/cooler configuration - NVidia cards seem much more varied (though perhaps this varies by region - I'm used to UK/US products). Also, with so many of these companies producing both ATI and NVidia cards, is it actually down to the OEMs? They're often just branding stuff, aren't they?

On the other hand the basic stuff from which a board is made, the GPU itself and core components like the power supply, should be common across a whole range of SKUs/brands.

I look at the placement of that heatsink that fell off this X800XT AIW and think "bad design putting it in the (genuinely hot) exhaust of the cooler." That's solely down to ATI as far as I can tell, AIWs have always been solely reference design, haven't they?...

Meanwhile Scan.co.uk decided to kick my order around the warehouse for an extra day, so gratification comes tomorrow...

Jawed

 

Worse than I thought

Looking more closely, while swapping in my new graphics card (which is working great) I discovered that the near death experience was more serious than I realised:

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That's a floppy disk power molex, not a standard molex.​

And the chip that failed was the chip that was left behind! not the chip that stayed attached to the heatsink:​

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Note that looking at the pairing, the top chip has disappeared, along with the heatsink. And the bottom chip is a charred mess.​

I'm afraid to say the failure was prolly my fault: there was a "gauze" of dust across most of the heatsink fins, where the fins are exposed to the draught from the fan. It's interesting that the core itself didn't fail. I think the dust may have been biasing the airflow to the fins that exhausted air across this pair of chips and heatsink - so with the airflow across the rest of the heatsink reduced, the air was hotter than it would normally be.​

Stupidly, I didn't think to check this cooler when I cleaned out dust from the system a few months back. The CPU fan and heatsink each had an accumulation of dust, which I cleared.​

Jawed​