PS = Pete Stieber
PS>>> I opened the case to confirm the graphics card type
PS>>> (ATI 9250 / 128 MB DDR TV-out DVI 64-bit). When I
PS>>> did this I noticed the fan attached to the heat sink
PS>>> was frozen.
PS>>>
PS>>> My new guess is the card would overheat when the X
PS>>> server started.
PS>>>
PS>>> Does this seam reasonable?
T = Tim
T>> That's quite likely. Or, it might work until you
T>> did something graphically intensive, then fail.
T>> I've certainly come across the latter.
T>>
T>> I now own a fairly good NVidia graphics card thanks
T>> to a failed fan. It belonged to a friend who's
T>> computer would die after a while, and he didn't
T>> bother to find out why until I goaded him. In a
T>> typical Windows user fashion, he just rebooted and
T>> re-installed repeatedly, hoping that would magically
T>> solve his crashes. Pulling the PC apart, we found a
T>> seized fan.
T>>
T>> Faced with having to spend a silly amount of money
T>> for a fan that would fit onto the card, or a similar
T>> amount to buy a new and better card, or jury-rigging
T>> an extra fan into his case. He bought a new card,
T>>> and gave me the old one. I just sat an ordinary
T>> computer case fan next to the card to cool it, and
T>> it runs fine. In fact, this fan cools the whole
T>> card, and cools it better than the piddly little
T>> fan that came with the card.
PS> Thanks for the info Tim. You may have missed my
PS> last post. A friend related a story about a noisy
PS> fan on a MB support chip. When he posted the
PS> problem and mentioned the MB model someone else
PS> mentioned they had the same MB, but their support
PS> chip just had the heat sink. He simply removed the
PS> fan and it worked.
PS>
PS> To test this theory for the graphics card we removed
PS> the fan, opened the case, and pointed a fan directly
PS> at the card. The card x server still froze. The
PS> heat sink that was under the fan was *not* hot to
PS> the touch.
PS>
PS> I dropped back to the standard VESA VGA X driver.
PS> It worked. It even worked with screen savers and
PS> OpenGL applications.
PS>
PS> I'm wondering if I should I post a fedora bugzilla
PS> report for the ATI driver?
PS>
PS> The card freezes when I use
PS> xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.7.197-1.fc8. Considering the fan
PS> problem, my bugzilla report may get ignored. I don't
PS> see similar complaints in the red hat bugzilla database.
PS>
PS> I'm waiting for a new ATI card. I'm not sure if it has
PS> the same ATI chip. If it does and exhibits the same
PS> problem, I'll definitely make a bug report.
Well, I got the new ATI AGP card, but got absolutely no display when I
put it in the machine. I put the original card back in the machine and
looked at the red hat bugzilla data base one more time and found
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=404261
Adding the following
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Seems to have solved the problem.
I hope that helps someone else.
Pete
