ATI HD4870 Freezing

Peter3hg

Peter3hg

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My old HD4870 appears to be on its last legs. It has had occasional freezes for years but now it happens very regularly. Something like Google Earth or Minecraft (at conservative settings) will normally cause it to freeze within minutes although this can be literally as soon as it loads or as long as half an hour. I don't think it is overheating because the fan doesn't spin up much before it happens. Sometimes it won't freeze but I'll end up with artifacts all over the screen which only go away with a reboot.
My question is, as the card is over five years old, is it worth trying to strip it down and apply new thermal paste, or should I just replace it?
If I replaced it it would be with something middle range as I don't do much PC gaming these days. Something under ?100. Any recommendations?
 
Before you consider messing with the cooling, does it even get unusually hot before freezing?
 
Not as far as I can tell. There is no obvious pattern if I log the temperatures. It also doesn't always happen under peak load, although it rarely happens under light load.
 
Improving cooling for the GPU isn't going to help if heat is no issue :(

Its RAM may of course be overheating and flipping some burgers bits, but I fear you won't have a sensor for that.
 
It got much worse during the course of yesterday to the point it died about 30 seconds after booting the computer. I stripped it down, cleared the crap out and applied some new thermal paste but it made no difference.
So I now have an HD7770. Not much of an upgrade but it was fairly cheap and will be sufficient as I don't do much PC gaming these days.
 
The PSU is an OCZ ModXStream 500w, about 3.5 years old.
 
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