A month ago I upgraded my graphics from radeon 9200 to radeon 9600, it has now died. I was playing star trek elite force 2, when the graphics went crazy, there was multicoloured lines all over. I closed the game down and the desktop had the same lines. I turned off for an hour, then went back to it, it was the same. I uninstalled the drivers and re-installed them, and in the bios activated the overheating alarm. It then had an error where it reset something because the graphics was not responding. Then nothing worked and the monitor told me it was out of frequency. I changed the graphics card back to the 9200 and all was fine, except that I was running a 3d screensaver and the overheating alarm wentoff. My pc is 3 1/2 yrs old and never had an overheating problem. I have cleaned the processor fan. Any advice would be helpful. (P.S sorry it's a longwinded problem)

What's your cooling solution like? Any intake fans? How many exhaust fans? Any intake fans on the side of the case? The Radeon 9xxx series was notorious for great performance but came at the cost of terrible heat problems without reasonable cooling.

erm Not sure what those are? :( there is a fan at the top of the back of the tower, one on the processor, and there is just a heat thing (metal strips - i forget what it's called) on the 9200, There was however a fan on top of the heat strips on the 9600. The thing i don't get is that it could handle oblivion game (which is why I upgraded the graphics!!) on a hotter day with no probs, and then on a cooler day it can't handle on older game and a screensaver

If you enabled an overheating alarm in the BIOS, it's for your CPU, not your video card. What temperature did you set the threshhold at? As for case cooling fans, the following was taken directly from AMD Builder's Guide: The first six factors are relatively self-evident, the seventh one can be elusive. Here are some basic guidelines to aid in finding an enclosure with adequate cooling capability: • Standard horizontal cases are not recommended—use vertical cases only. • With the vertical case, a power supply with ATX-style bottom air intake vents maintains a better thermal environment than a power supply with only a front air intake vent. • Cases with an added fan in the back cool better than cases without an added fan. • The rear fans must all pull air in the same direction; otherwise one fan pulls warm air out of the enclosure while the other fan pulls the preheated air back into the enclosure. • Front intake fans have not proven to be a significant benefit for vertical cases. • Fans 80mm or larger work best. • There must be clear space in front of the system case to allow cooling air to flow in, and space behind the case for the heated air to flow out. • Cables inside the enclosure can cause airflow disruptions. Cable-tie and route the cables out of the path of the cooling airflow.

I think I set it at 67, as my mate said 70 was bad so I though a couple under that would be best. The cables inside are tidy, and there is loads of space around everything because of this. I still don't know if the overheating is the actual cause of the graphics card death. I did note however that the card wasn't clipped into place fully (my mate installed it) could this have been part of the problem?