Ok my Radeon 9700 Pro is officially dead. My computer doesn’t POST with it. I tried it in another computer that has onboard VGA, switched the BIOS to try to init the AGP card first, and it POSTS, using the onboard!

The heat spreader on the chip heats up, but no matter what I do – remove all devices, use VGA instead of DVI, plug no auxillery power (should cause the card to display “requres additional power” on screen”, I can’t get a picture or a POST beep.

ATI just lost a customer for life. Last card I hard of theirs (9100), the fan died after 10 months, and games strated crashing because the heat was not beaing extracted from the chip. I didn’t notice for 3 months, which meant it was out of warranty. I removed the fan, and passive cooling worked though…but they still seem to have bad quality control (the 9700 Pro here has been RMA’d 3 times).

Never had any problems with NVidia with the GeForce2 MX I had, and that card is STILL going! 6600GT looks appealing…