Yesterday I decided that I would take my Radeon XT 2900 HD video card out and dust it out. I opened it up, got it a good, thorough cleaning, put it all back together, and put it back in my computer. After having thought I was very careful in making sure everything was put back together properly, I had managed to forget to reconnect the GPU’s fan connection, and had turned on my computer and tried to test out how the games ran on it. About 10 seconds into my gaming, my computer locked up, and a few seconds later the video card had made a few “popping” sounds. I turned off the computer and tried to take the card out, only to find the card to be extremely hot (at which point I realized my error in forgetting to reconnect the fan). I cooled it off and took it out to do a visual inspection of it. I haven’t opened it back up, but from the outside everything looks fine (the cover for it is transparent). I reinstalled the card (fan reconnected), and proceeded on very carefully. The video card works just fine when I’m doing anything that isn’t gaming, but as soon as I start up some games, the fan gets up to a very high speed really fast (almost sounds like a jet turbine), and the screen will occasionally flicker.
All this being said, is it possible that during that brief moment the video card got hot enough that it damaged it, or might there be something I can do to repair it?
