Flojer0

That was my second thought but this use case was at high risk of overheating. If it is not the vrm then what? Maybe I'll try mounting the cooler again just to see if that was the problem. I also did notice since yesterday that there is some new scarring on the copper plate of the cooler. I don't see any visible damage on the die, is it possible I've damaged the core beyond use without visible damage?

Alright, though apparently I was mistaken and it was capacitors that were leaking.

I managed to get all the numbers off. The small caps have: 6811 88LW 1236 The big caps: 6894 AM82 1232 And the mosfet says: GS7805D F2WBH Not sure if or when I'll attempt a repair. But it would be an excuse to play with a soldering iron.

Photo is highlighted now. I was somehow led to believe that fets were under the vrm heatsink, probably wrong though. Caps make a lot more sense. I was actually looking at the larger caps in the area to see if any of them had leaked but didn't find anything. If it is indeed leaky caps and a snapped mosfet leg then I my guess is the leg got snapped somehow and the electrical issues caused when the card went under load wreaked havoc on those surface mount caps. Meaning that if the card is salvageable then it would need a new mosfet and caps, assuming that is all the damage. If I could of caught the fet earlier I could have soldered a jumper wire in there. Oh well. Edit: Just looked up mosfets to figure more out and came across this little article: http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/voltmods/21 If we are talking about the same thing then it looks fine to me. *shrug*

Thermal tape Sorry, I lost some text when I accidentally pressed the back button. It looks to me like the mosfets leaked something, but I've never heard of this happening before. Though as explained I am not sure if this is entirely the demise of this card.

To begin with I am considering my PGU dead. As background This GPU is a AMD 7870 XT that has lived a hard life. Along with gaming on it I mined on it from early December to late March. Along with that I did have an AIO cooler cable tied to my GPU die. I do have heatsinks on the ram but I have been depending on incidental airflow from the case for cooling the board, couple with the coin mining this probably has a very large share in my symptoms. The story leading to today's symptoms started a week ago. I swapped power supplies in my machine, in the process I needed to remove my GPU and the attached radiator. This caused the pump/cold-plate to move and may have disturbed the thermal paste. After the PSU swap was done the GPU couldn't keep cool. Simple enough, just re-mount the cooler. I get some more cable ties and re-paste the thing, the whole process goes perfectly smooth, so much so I wonder what is wrong as I'm hooking the computer back up. Then my trouble begins. First thing after turning my computer on was starting unengine valley to see where my temps were. The benchmark loads up and starts running, then within seconds my screens go black. This behavior continues for anything that stresses the GPU from 3D games to Luxmark, Fez was usually okay unless the framerate jumped above 60, then it artifacted everywhere. 2D games and normal usage were safe until just recently. I was surfing the web when both my screens went nuts with artifacts. Lastly I pulled the GPU assuming the worst and saw this when I pulled the board out (Mosfet heatsink removed for visibility): EDIT: I guess I lost some text before posting, the dark area around the mosfets looks like some liquid leaked out to me.

I like the IPS screen

AMD is weird with temps. Same on my wife's computer with an FX-6100.

I commented on the youtube vid but I'll put this here since the youtube comment will sink into the depths of the internets before we know it. "I've been using ting for my wife an I and it has been amazing. It saves us $50 a month. The only downside is we needed to buy sprint phones to jump aboard, but the plan has long since made up for that investment."

Did you try the digital trips? I'm pretty addicted to Alone right now.

I could share videos all night but here are a few of the most relevant.

I'm just going to put this here.

I've also used piriform recuva with limited success: http://www.piriform.com/recuva Keep in mind that you can't recover anything that is written over and that many SSD's clean themselves up with time. But if you put the time in with the right software I would be surprised if you truly lost everything.

I don't know how to tell for certain but those little packs usually have two AA cells in them which are usually NiMH. But they don't have to be. They wouldn't be lead acid, those are more like motorcycle or car batteries. And Li-ion and Li-ion polymer are expensive, to get two of those in a pack like that would be $15 or up just for the cells. So my guess is NiMH.

Here is the wubi installer faq, and the second link is to the installer: http://wubi.sourceforge.net/faq.php http://download.cnet.com/Wubi/3000-2094_4-10701841.html I couldn't find a download for an installer newer than 12.04 (Current ubuntu is 14.04) and I couldn't find an installer anywhere else but Cnet unfortunately. But run that installer on a windows machine, reboot, select ubuntu, and off you go. If that won't work I can link you to instructions to set up a virtual machine in windows.