Was watching one of CmdrSoyo's videos on youtube and one of the things he mentioned that could revive cards that were artifacting was simply cleaning the PCB thoroughly. I'd seen cleaning a card as a suggestion in the past, but I never really thought about the PCB, itself. I keep the dust from accumlulating on the heatsink fins and I thought that was about it. Naw, the kind of thermal pads that many manufacturers use tend to leak out their guts over time and the oily residue collects dust. I didn't see any of that until I removed the heatsink and memory/VRM plate.
I cleaned all that off and now the card is detected in windows and lets me choose full-resolution, rather than the 800x600 it was stuck at! I did not expect it to work again!
Bad news is it's still artifacting and in device manager there is a notice that "the device was shut down due to a problem."
I'm thinking it needs a bath in an ultrasonic cleaner to get under the chips, but mine's only large enough for like a watch or something.
Anyway, probably wouldn't have had a problem if I'd been changing the thermal pads every couple years like you're supposed to.
I cleaned all that off and now the card is detected in windows and lets me choose full-resolution, rather than the 800x600 it was stuck at! I did not expect it to work again!
Bad news is it's still artifacting and in device manager there is a notice that "the device was shut down due to a problem."
I'm thinking it needs a bath in an ultrasonic cleaner to get under the chips, but mine's only large enough for like a watch or something.
Anyway, probably wouldn't have had a problem if I'd been changing the thermal pads every couple years like you're supposed to.